At the age of 11, Gabriel Sean Ngoga, a student at Wellspring Academy has been able to develop a basic website where visitors can access different movies and watch them. It was after he enrolled in Future Coders, a programme by kLab, which offers basic programming skills to children aged 12 to 17. Inspired by the Covid-19 lockdowns, Ngoga developed the web to help movie lovers access them on his platform. “If I continue developing it, it will be like a Rwandan Netflix,” he said, proud of the progress he has made. “Basically,” he continued, “You go to the website, see a trailer of the movie before you can decide to watch it. You first have to sign up to have an account. It took me four weeks to finalise its layout and a few others to modify it.” Consolatrice Byiringiro, Programs Manager at kLab speaks to students who completed the training session . Courtesy His dream is to become a professional coder and is set to enrol in an advanced programme, which he believes will be his launch pad into the world of mobile applications development. That makes his mother, Maureen Byamugisha, proud because she believes coding is the future and has played a big role in helping his son pursue his dreams by enrolling him in helpful programs like Future Coders and providing him with internet and desired equipment. “I am proud that my son has a passion for coding which I believe is the future and that he is putting in much work to learn skills and build on them,” she said. Raymond Ntwali, another graduate of Future Coders Programme is a Senior 4 student at Lycee de Kigali. The 16-year-old has also been able to develop a shoe store website where one can access different types of shoes and buy them. “Nowadays, most people like stuff about fashion such as shoes. That’s why I said, why not create a shoes web page and help my colleagues get the best shoes? Then, I started designing the shoe store,” he said. “I think when people reach my page, it’s going to help them get quality shoes of their choice. They don’t have to waste their time searching for shoes they need and sometimes never find them.” Gabriel Sean Ngoga presenting his website He noted that while developing the website, he used HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the code that is used to structure a web page and its content, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), the coding language that gives a website its look and layout, and JavaScript, a powerful and flexible programming language that can execute on a web browser that allows one to make interactive webpages such as popup menus, animations, form validation, among others. He longs to keep improving his website by adding more options that visitors and users may need and to keep learning in order to become a better programmer. The way forward According to Consolatrice Byiringiro, Programmes Manager at kLab, in the first cohort of the Future Coders Programme which took place online in February 2022, four students graduated with desired skills. “We enrolled students from P5 to Senior 4 and they had no clue about programming and how to develop a website, but now they are good at developing their own websites and hosting them,” she said, adding that they are going to enrol the graduates in their advanced 4-months programme, kLab Startups Academy, so that they can access advanced skills and work on projects to be put on the market. She added: “We are creating as many capacity building programs as possible. In the kLab Startups Academy, we train tech talents to become software developers but also tech entrepreneurs to develop their own projects.We give them business skills to move their ideas from ideation level to the prototype level. We are also willing to invest in software analysis and data analysis to equalise the technical skills we are offering to the business skills needed at the market.” Byiringiro also revealed that in the next cohort of the Future Coders Programme, they seek to train children at their schools and at their training space in Kacyiru starting in Mid-June. Jean Michael Nzakwituriki who trained the children in the first cohort said it is significant to train them when they are still young because the future of work is going to be digitalised, adding that they want to prepare them ahead of time so that they can have a robust foundation for the future. He noted that while training them, he helps them to understand the programming language and gives them time to think and come up with their ideas.
