Like any other youngster nowadays, the underprivileged children and teenagers we work with need computer skills. If they are not technologically literate, they will only fall further behind their more advantaged peers.

To meet their needs, we teach our students computer skills like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and social media. But by far the most exciting courses are web and game design!

On these courses, our students learn how to create their own website and games, as well as some basic coding. This changes their world and gives them the skills to change the world around them.

Thanks to some generous private donations, we were able to buy some new laptops. Not only can we now reach even more young people with the program, but we can continue doing so in the years to come!

We run our Web Design course several times throughout the year because group size is limited to 10.

On one hand, this is because of the number of laptops we have available. But on the other, this ensures that every student gets hands-on help from our volunteer teachers.

The course begins with discussion and analysis of current websites. Students examine whether the sample websites provided are successful in meeting their goals. This ensures that the students are thinking critically about the purposes of websites from the very beginning.

All students must then come up with a product or service that will be the subject of their own website. This can be anything from a hair salon to an online tool, the choice is theirs!

Once students have selected their product or service, we introduce them to the web-building platform, Weebly. They then spend the rest of the course learning how to use Weebly to build all aspects of a website, like pages and posts.

The students also learn about crucial aspects of website content, such as SEO, keywords, and metatags. At the end of the course, all students present their newly-designed websites and elaborate upon what they have learned.

EduMais’s Game Design course teaches children how to use the programming language Scratch. With this, they learn how to code video games and create animation, as well as remix what others have already done.

During the course, our students are introduced to several coding and programming concepts and techniques. These include:

• how to import or select sounds from Scratch
• how to change backdrops in Scratch and create costumes for Sprites
• learning what a variable and the x and y axes are
• using mathematics to improve games and animation by understanding and using variables in code
• learning about “debugging”

Students work in pairs to design their game over the course, gaining invaluable collaboration experience in the process. They also develop their creative thinking, deductive reasoning, and problem-solving abilities, all of which are essential life skills.

Being literate in modern society involves coding knowledge. Starting the children young ensures they are well-prepared for the future ahead. And by introducing them to programming through gaming, they have a lot of fun in the process!