A Look At The Success Story Of The AIR's GTech Programme

Following the opening of Africa ICT Right (AIR) project in the Northern region dubbed 'Girls In Technology (GTech)' since May 2014, the GTech program has held two training programs for 14 teachers and 10 volunteers on 5th May and October on how to deliver basic coding skills using scratch programming language to the young girls under the program.

Scratch is a great tool to introduce children to computer science. It is a very easy tool that helps children to create their own animations and games.

The launch of the GTech program in Tamale has chalked tremendous success, in an attempt to inspire young girls in underserved communities to undertake computer science education.

In July, Blogging Ghana used the GTech resource center to organize a one day workshop for NGOs in the Northern region. The workshop brought over 28 NGOs operating in the Northern part of Ghana. They were taught how to use Google apps and social media tools to reach their targeted audience.

The GTech resource center is opened from Monday to Saturday every week for young girls from 7 schools as well as the youth in the community. The GTech program has over 530 girls actively involved in this program.

Our team from Modern Ghana visited one of their after-school training sessions where we saw some of these young girls developing some amazing games like Pong, Mini Mario and some interactive stories. It was exciting to watch what young people are creating and learning with Scratch but the Executive Director says that this is just the beginning.

Aminu Ayisha, a student from Darul Hadis Junior High School has this to say “I love Scratch. I like making the program, the background then making the sprite move around everywhere."

Mr. Maxwell Tsyi, one of the beneficiary teachers said, “We have found out that girl who are actively involved in the program have started to think of themselves differently. They now see themselves as creators and designers, as people who can make things with digital media, not just browse, chat, and play games.”

Mr. Daniel Kwaku Ganyoame, the Executive Director of AIR, has this to say when interviewed by our team, “We don't necessarily want every young girl to become a computer scientist or to work as an engineer, but we want every young girl to be exposed to these new ways of thinking which is possible through basic coding skills".

The GTech program also participated in this year “Hour of Code” week by organising a two days free introductory to computer programming for students of all ages on the 12th and 13th of December 2014 at its Resource center in Wurishie a suburb of Tamale near the Tamale Polytechnic.

The two days program brought over 120 students from Darul Hadis JHS, Choggu Yapalsi M/A JHS and Bagabaga Dem. JHS schools. The students took an hour of code by programming Christmas cards, animating their names and also programming a simple game called Pong. All the participated students were presented with certificates from Code.org.