Am writing from Dar es salaam, Tanzania.
My name is Alfeo Raymond, i am a Web Developer by profession and a Teacher by passion
I have come through a challenge and I think it’s worth sharing it with the world and see if the solution can be found
A month ago, while leading a Technical session at One of schools i was assigned to, one of my students asked me a question: “So what's next after this, we don’t see any useful activity we have done yet from this program and it ends??”
Due to the concern raised by that student I had a discussion by myself and As a conclusion of that talk, I decided to structure my idea on words and see what the world have to offer.
My writing might not be too formal and professional thus I would request that you add more ingredients to it.
The problem
It has been observed that most students taking Technical related degree programmes have no or vague idea of the career path they want to take after graduating from college due to the poor technical foundation at school level.
Only a few have a picture of which path they’ll take, and most often this last group comes from technical schools. Also, this last group adapts easily when joining technical courses at university compared to the first group.
Initiatives taken to address the problem
In 2019, Dlab in partnership with UDSM initiated a Human Centered Design (HCD) programme, featuring secondary school students from few schools, enabling the students to come up with solutions to the given challenge; by using the HCD methodology.
They were trained for a period of 9 months and at last they created solutions to their given challenges, and wow! they did great.
But despite the initiative launched, as well as other similar trainings from other institutions; there is no clear long term impact on those students. They got a glimpse of how to use technology to solve community challenges; then what’s next?
As technology (ICT) evolves everyday, in order to keep up with this race we need to set a railroad for our youngsters to follow while enriching their skills. I believe that if we enrich this big baobab tree from the roots, we will have sweet fruits than focusing on budding the branches.
Now, what do you think can be done to solve this.
Any idea will be good to me and us🙂. So just write
Phew!! That was long.
contacts:
+255 745 909 129/ +255 737 539 892
ngelime07@gmail.com
instagram @alfeoraymond
Top comments (2)
The best way to address the problem is bringing the academic life more close to real life factories.
Let the student develop real project in the university, not only one time, in the end of the course, but during all the years! Give grades or bonuses to those engaged in open-source communities. Schools that teach IT should also be more in touch with the companies in the local market to be aligned in which technologies to teach.
These are my suggestions, hope they are useful.
Feels good to see one of us being such a vital contribution to the community. I am coming up with some good stuff boss. See you soonest.