Falling Walls Falling Walls Science Summit 2023

Breaking the Wall to teaching coding in a developing country

Teaching Coding Concepts in Disadvantaged Areas

Jean Greyling

Future Learning Global Call Winner

Introducing learners from disadvantaged areas to coding concepts without computers

In South Africa (as in many other countries) there is a desperate shortage of Software Developers. 16000 of our 25000 schools do not have computer labs. Consequently millions of learners from mainly disadvantage communities are mainly unaware of the lucrative career opportunities in the field. TANKS was a postgraduate project conducted by Byron Batteson in the Department of Computing Sciences at Nelson Mandela University. TANKS makes use of customized tokens, a mobile app and image recognition to introduce learners to coding concepts that would be taught in a typical introductory programming module at university. Compared to the need of computer labs or expensive robots, TANKS is thus a very low cost solution to the problem.

 

Tags: Tanks Coding, Unplugged Coding, Teaching Coding Concepts

To Science Summit 2021

Jean Greyling

Nelson Mandela University

Prof. Greyling is Head of Department of Computing Sciences at Nelson Mandela University, Gqeberha, South Africa. He is mainly involved in teaching and research related to programming. Since 2017 he has been coordinating the Tangibl Coding project (mainly with the TANKS coding app), introducing learners to coding without the use of a computer. The project has reached around 25000 learners across South Africa, targeting disadvantaged schools without computer labs. In 2021 he coordinating online and physical CODING UNPLUGGED workshops, reaching nearly 1000 educators in South Africa.

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