The Federal Ministry of Communications in its bid to help Nigerian Secondary school girls develop an early interest in computing and related careers, started the Digital Girls Club. The club is an online initiative designed to help Nigerian secondary school girls develop an early interest in computers and in the information and communication technology field as a whole.
The ministry partnered with the Women’s Technology Empowerment Centre (W.TEC) and Women in Technology in Nigeria (WITIN) to develop the curriculum and content for the online portal. The hands-on portal, features online tutorials on Creating Games in Alice Programming, Computer hardware, How Computers Are Built, Introduction to Building Websites Using HTML, Introduction to JavaScript, Introduction to Programming Using Python and others
To bring stakeholders up to speed with the programme towards the 2019/2020 academic session, the Ministry of Communications organized a workshop in Abuja (May 20 – 21) for select ICT teachers on the Modus Operandi for the portal. The workshop at Abuja had 74 participants from Unity Schools (teachers from federal government secondary schools from all states in Nigeria) who were going to be the managers of the program in their schools.
The facilitators for the workshop were from both W.TEC and WITIN. For W.TEC was Programmes Manager and Programmes Assistant, Folashade Braimoh and Lesley Tarabina respectively while Martha Alade of WITIN with her team also facilitated at the workshop.
W.TEC’s team trained the teachers on how to operate the curriculum of the portal, they also trained the teachers on new programming courses and Artificial Intelligence which have been added to portal.
Feedback from the workshops’ participants were fulfilling as many of them were excited to have more localized digital teaching aids for their students.
Our team at the event also shared with us their personal experiences during the workshop
Folashade: Personally, it was a great experience for me as I got to share valuable knowledge and interacted with teachers of federal government colleges from all over the nation.
Lesley: Being in the Federal capital city again was exciting, the teachers were very nice and they showed so much interest in what we thought them, I would love to do this again and again.