Barbara Ojur
Director at 67 Games · Electrical & Computer Engineer, Cape Town
Barbara is a director at 67 games — a project for Africans to build 67 games for Mandela Day 2016, with a focus on creating education. “It’s a platform to show Africans that we need to create our own games instead of always consuming games from others. When African kids see an African making games with African landscapes and African activities, they can see themselves doing it too. They see the opportunity instead of something that happens in a far off land. I’m working on a game that helps teaches kids about children’s rights, such as the right to go to school and what it means to be healthy.”
Barbara just earned her degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Cape Town. “For my thesis I worked on taking shadows away from images. I did this in two stages. First I detected where the shadow was in an image and then used another algorithm in the second step to correct the shadows. Correcting the pixels is the difficult part, since if it’s not done correctly the image looks distorted. After experimenting, I found a combination of algorithms worked best.”
“I was really proud of figuring this out on my own because it showed that I had learned so much since I started and that I can solve real world problems. I enjoyed the entire process and my experience reinforced that engineering is something that I want to do.”
“The way the world is going right now, people need to really equip themselves with engineering skills — especially coding. It’s like reading. If you can program, then you can build anything. As long as you get the basics, then you can be versatile in whatever you do.”
