Bayelsa Educational Devt Trust Fund uplifts students with coding/robotics

Nathan Tamarapreye, Yenagoa

A total of 101 senior secondary school students in Bayelsa are undergoing a one-month robotics and coding training programme to equip them with new knowledge in Artificial Intelligence.

Our correspondent who visited the training venue in Yenagoa on Thursday, reports that 12 teachers are also participating in the “Holiday Camping/Coding and Robotics Programme for Senior Secondary Schools”.

The programme is sponsored by the Bayelsa Education Development Trust Fund (EDTF).

Also, 1,200 senior students moving from SS2 to SS3, are also undergoing this year’s summer camping to adequately prepare them to independently sit qualifying examinations like the National Examinations Council Senior School Certificate, West African Senior School Certificate Examination and the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board examinations.

The Executive Secretary of the EDTF, Dr Alice Atuwo, stated these during the ‘meet the trainees and trainers’ session at the St. Jude’s Girls Secondary School, Amarata, Yenagoa.

She explained that the robotics and coding training was newly introduced by the Fund as part of the summer camping programme and the students were drawn from the 12 state-owned model boarding schools in the eight local government areas of the state.

Atuwo said the benefiting teachers were expected to also carry out the robotics and coding training in their various schools to sustain the programme.

“For the past five years, we have been running this programme for students that are transiting from SS2 to SS3. The programme holds in all the local government headquarters and the duration is 30 days, from 1st to 31st October.

“But this year, we introduced another segment. We brought in experts in coding and robotics. There are 101 children, but these ones are not SS2 and SS3. They are only SS1 children.

“They are undergoing robotics and coding training with one teacher from each school being trained so that when they go back to school, they will continue with the programme and continue to link up with the trainers so that if there is any difficulty, they will get them through and continue the training,” she said.

Atuwo said the agency had recorded over 80 per cent success as terminal students had passed their terminal examinations effortlessly, stressing that “the best gift you can give a child is that, at the secondary level, that child should be able to write the national examinations and pass it on his or her own.”

She, therefore, expressed confidence that Bayelsa was on the right track towards building a strong future by equipping the students with relevant information and communication and technology skills to enable them to compete favourably with their peers elsewhere.

Some of the students, Glory Sunday, Model Secondary School, Brass, Emmanuel Jacob, Ijaw National Academy, Kaiama, Izolo Abraham, Southern Ijaw Secondary School, Oporoma, and Brown Praise, Ijaw National Academy made demonstrations on basic robotics processes and coding programme.

Also, Lucky Erebo and Jonathan Alali, said they were happy to gain skills in web development and programming language, describing the training as worthwhile.

“The experience has been amazing. At first, when they talked about the training programme, it sounded boring. We are in the ICT era, this training will go a long way,” Alali said.

One of the facilitators, Abel Paul, said the students had been exposed to website development in the course of the training and had been able to build beautiful projects such as web pages for their schools, log-in and registration portals capable of collecting information and storing it on a database.

He said that the robotics session dwelt on, the assembly of robots, artificial intelligence and programming of robots to perform specified tasks.