After the successful implementation of the Ist Phase of the Codeschool project, Lagos State government takes another bold step to announce the implementation of the second phase, which will be launched in September 2017.
The Codeschool project started few months ago and 5,464 students in primary and secondary schools across the State have been trained.
Disclosing this to the public recently, Obafela Bank-Olemoh, the Special Adviser to the Governor on Education, said that 65 schools including government and private schools took part in the pilot phase.
He stated that “The training has delivered to the students’ critical life skills including basic computing, computational thinking and use of basic computer programming tools like Scratch and python over a period of 8 weeks and the feedback has been inspiring.”
Of the 65 schools in the pilot, 23 are government schools of which 7 of them are girls only schools while 2 others are boys only.
Mr. Obafela Bank-Olemoh disclosed that the experience and learnings from the pilot phase has helped the Ministry to assess and fine-tune the framework and implementation model of the project in view of future roll out.
In his words “This pilot phase has helped us test our assumptions and implementation plan, we have observed what worked and what didn’t and would put them into consideration for future roll out beginning with the next batch slated for September, 2017.”
Meanwhile, the State is also set to roll out the project in all the State-owned public libraries to ensure access to CodeLagos classes for more lagosians especially those out of the conventional schools system.
Bank-Olemoh stated that more Lagosians will now partake of the training free-of-charge at any of the public libraries. In his words, “We currently have 12 Libraries and we are setting up Coding Centres in each of the libraries for Lagosians to partake of the programme. We will also have coding centres in our tertiary institutions.”
CodeLagos, an initiative of the Lagos State Ministry of Education, which aims to teach 1 million Lagosians to code by 2019 was unveiled to the public in November 2016.
Bank-Olemoh said “CodeLagos will ensure that the Lagos economy has the people that will drive its development for the next 50 years, positioning Lagos State as the technology frontier in Africa.
The general public is enjoined to visit www.codelagos.org as the registration portal would be open for the public to sign up for free on Monday August 21, 2017.
