by NKHENSANI NKUNA
PHALABORWA, (CAJ News) – ASHLEY Sekgobela (26) is on a mission to introduce members of his community of Phalaborwa to coding, commonly known as computer programming.
He believes that every learner must be taught at least the basics of coding from a young age, as the world is in the fourth industrial era. Coding is basically how humans communicate with computers and tell them what to do. It is instrumental in building websites and other applications.
Although in high school he was a mathematics genius and participated in maths Olympiads and benchmarks, he was only introduced to coding in 2017 in his second year of mechanical engineering at the University of Pretoria.
“This was when I started appreciating the importance of coding and computer programming skills in general, as they play a key role in software development and other areas of the fourth industrial revolution,” Sekgobela said.
“I believe learners should be exposed to such at a very young age, so that when they reach varsity they don’t struggle. Unfortunately Phalaborwa is one of the areas where coding is not so prevalent, hence I decided to host and facilitate Tangible Africa’s coding tournaments,” he said.
On July 18 this year, Tangible Africa in partnership with Leva Foundation, Nelson Mandela University’s computing sciences department and Amazon Web Services hosted an Mandela Day Unplugged Coding tournament, where different schools participated.
Sekgobela co-ordinated the tournament with the hosts Kingfisher Private School.
“Unplugged tournaments was when the learners were learning coding without using a computer, the main reason being that coding should also be accessible to learners in places where they don’t have computers,” Sekgobela.
In this case, coding simply refers to the process of assigning a code to something for classification or identification.
He encouraged both schools and parents to expose the youngsters to coding in order to prepare them for the future and to be relevant in the fourth industrial era.
– CAJ News