Paheja Siririka

WINDHOEK - Three ladies have taken it upon themselves to teach children aged five to 19 years about coding. Namibia Optimist Investment cc (NOI), in collaboration with the Namibia Business Innovation Institute (NBII), has created a platform for young Namibians to grasp the basics of coding. 

“Coding is creating an application for the computer,” said Johanna Amunyela who is a Software Engineer by profession and coding teacher at NOI. 

Operating under the theme “Coding Is The Future - Unleash Your Child’s Potential in 2019”, Amunyela works closely with teacher Rachel Ekandjo and office administrator, Beauty Tsuses, as well as two other interns to make sure the coding kids are well taken care of through NOI.

NOI is mostly about creating websites and application, “later on we saw a niche and realised many Namibians don’t know how to code or how to create computer programs,” said Amunyela. The program runs from Monday to Friday every week, from 14h00 to 16h30 and officially started this year with 11 students thus far. The program initially started off as a daycare and eventually transformed into a coding class.

It runs throughout the whole year, depending on how fast the kids learn. The NOI team is the providers of the tabs the kids use for coding. The grading starts at a junior level and later on splits according to progress. The parents are very much involved, “they are very keen on their children keeping up with technology,” said Amunyela. The program sponsors some learners with digital tablets while some parents have taken the extra mile and bought the equipment for their children to make the process easy and smooth.

For a program that has been running for three months only, challenges will be there, “managing kids is not easy that’s why we needed to get extra hands,” said Amunyela. “Some learners are faster than others, some get bored quickly and that is something we are learning to handle,” said Ekandjo.

“We don’t have strenuous activities with the learners, we have created a plan where we teach coding but in a fun way, I mean these kids come from school and you have heavy workload with them after school hours,” Amunyela pointed out. The kids are also assisted with homework from school and are allowed to be creative in their own space.