Digital Geekaship has created a series of holiday bootcamps for high school kids from grade 8 - 12. The purpose of the bootcamps is to drive an interest and basic competency in technology from a young age.
"Excellence in a field often comes from a strong interest during formative years. Engineers build and break their toys as children and doctors start off by doing surgeries on their toys. Therefore hot shot developers need to be moulded from an early age," says Lebo Moerane, director of Digital Geekaship.
The programme is facilitated by experienced developers and mentors who will be teaching the students about basic Web site development and design and an intro into some of the popular development languages. The content is geared around showcasing the possibilities of technology, a career in technology as well as allowing the students to get their hands dirty and write basic Web apps.
There is no greater time for young people to consider a career in software engineering and craftwo(man)ship as the country is experiencing a serious skills shortage in this field. "This software engineering and craftwo(man)ship skills shortage is a worldwide phenomenon as indicated currently by some of the partners we are engaging from other countries" says Tania van Wyk de Vries, director of Digital Geekaship.
The ICT skills gap is fuelled by a lack of skills currently available as well as a lack of interest by the youth in technology, so there are not enough technologist graduating each year. The implications of this being that South African organisations are outsourcing development to markets such as India, Ukraine and the Philippines.
"As indicated by local South African corporates we collaborating with, there is a desire to rather partner with local South African software engineering skills" says Van Wyk de Vries.
The Digital Geekaship Academy is a subsidiary of the Digital Geekaship. The academy is a software engineering and -craftwo(man) school that caters for a range of short and mid-term courses in software development and supporting modules such as user experience. Since its inception the Digital Geekaship has encountered the reality that university graduates in possession of a technology related degree are just not ready to join a corporate environment and that after spending three years doing a degree. This fuelled the need for Digital Geekaship to create a learning programme, developed by industry leaders and practitioners and supported by corporates, that crafts its qualifications with content aligned to the specific and changing needs of the industry as well as having a strong practical work experience component. By the time a student graduates from the academy they will have a reasonable amount of commercial work experience thus increasing their earning potential when they enter the work market and their likelihood of finding work.
Dates for the next upcoming Digital Geekaship Kids-Who-Code bootcamp are:
July / August / September Holidays
The upcoming bootcamp is focused on an Introduction to Web Development.
At the end of the two-day bootcamp, kids will have their first small Web site up and running and have idea of the basics of Web development.
The same programme runs over the following dates:
1, 2 Jul 2017
22, 23 Jul 2017
5, 6 Aug 2017
2, 3 Sep 2017
To register visit:
http://www.digitalgeekaship.co.za/kids-who-code-register/
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