African Girls Can Code Initiative: African camp in Addis Abeba
01 Saturday Sep 2018
Written by ADEL KASSAH in Workshops
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The African Girls Can Code Initiative is a four year project that will bring together Girls from all over the African continent across different languages to spark their interest in ICT as a career path and to empower them as young promising innovative women on the Continent. The initiative is in partenership between ITU (International Telecommunication Union), UN Women and the African Union.
The first African camp gathered girls from more than 30 African countries during 2 weeks.
I was in charge of the Robotics and IOT training. In the first week, the girls has to attend a 2 hour workshop about Gaming, animation, Turtles titch and IOT\Robotics. And this is a video of the first workshops for a group of Ethiopian girls. I was teaching in English and unfortunately the Ethiopian girls made very few interaction with me so I was thinking that they did not understand well. The answer come very quickly. I loved listening the girls talking in Amharic to solve the problem and in the end showing me the result in English. They started their first steps with Arduino by controlling LED.
During the second week, the girls had to choose between the 4 labs for a deeper training. IOT\Robotics was the the most requested one by the girls.
The second week was also as challenging as the first. I got 18 girls from more different countries and speaking both 3 languages: English, French and Arabic. So, I was saying a phrase in English, after that the translation in French. I had a girl from Sudan who was not fluent in English, so some times I had to add the Arabic translation. This is a video of the training:
In the end of the second week, the girls has to make projects that solves a problem in their community. One group proposed a solution to control farms irrigation system remotely by just sending an SMS. They simulated the system by a LAMP. And this is the final result: