The chairperson of a branch of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), Sibongile Makeleni, confirmed that he is on a mission to equip learners from different schools about Coding and Robotics at Bityi area in Mthatha.
He said this can help to reduce crime in the area because it will keep young people busy.
According to him, they can also do engineering when they reach tertiary institutions.
“I took this decision because I always teach learners maths and physics because I saw the need to do so. Then we were visited by Tangible Africa to introduce this programme of Coding and Robotics,” said Makeleni.
He said he managed to assist learners from 18 schools.
He confirmed that he was given a chance to be Regional Co-ordinator and that led him to manage to employ 11 young people around Mthatha to assist him in this programme.
Makeleni said that they also extended this programme to Port St Johns, where they are working with the chairperson for Gandaganda Forum, Jessie Willard.
Talking about this programme, Willard confirmed that they are still running it in the schools that are under Port St Johns. She said that this programme has assisted learners in the subjects they struggle with, like maths. It has a lot of designs and critical thinking, and of course learning to know how robots function.
“The advantage is that they know how to code; they will surely be successful in the future and employment is large to those who know IT. Disadvantages or challenges are that, firstly it is new to everyone and not everyone sees or understands how serious it is, especially the elderly, but as time goes they learn its importance. Running it in the rural areas is not easy, because we always have challenges of network and schools do not have computers or tablets, so we are battling along using phones, as the programme we are doing is called unplugged coding, where we make use of phones and computers,” said Willard.
She also revealed that some of the children in the rural areas do not own phones, so they share the few phones they have which causes a delay in the progress of reaching many students at a time.
“We are a dedicated team; we have committed ourselves to work under these conditions so our kids are not be left behind as usual in the rural areas.”
