A visit to a milk shake parlor and some catching up with a friend led me to MPUC high school, Manipal, to meet a bunch of fellow engineering students, all toiling away with their students on a computer on a hot summer afternoon. My curiosity towards knowing more about the program led me to work and understand a new outlook with a great bunch of people all dedicated to a mission: To bring about awareness among students on computer literacy.
Teach Code for Good is an enthusiastic group of students in their second and third years of engineering at MIT who wish to impart education in basic coding and computer programming to ones who aren’t fortunate of its access. Its founder, Sai Abishek, conceived the idea, when he participated at the Harvard MUN held in Seoul, South Korea, where he learned of “The Resolution Project”, which was started a decade ago by two Harvard undergrads who now have their own company that supports social ventures like these.
“I learned coding back in my eighth standard as part of my curriculum, but I started thinking about how not everyone is as lucky. Especially many high schoolers in India, who cannot afford quality computer education. So I decided to address the matter and put forward the idea of Teach Code for Good, where undergraduate and graduate students would visit high schools and help them learn to code, or at the very least get them interested in the subject.”, says Sai.
With the idea in mind, he came back to Manipal and decided to implement this at the Saralebettu school. The highest grade at that school was the 7th, and he started teaching them Scratch (which is essentially an animation software) with his roommate, since teaching them to code in other high level languages would require a basic understand of algorithms.
Eventually, the team expanded to MPUC, which had high school students. With the help of classmates Aakash, Akshay, Gautam, Hana and Namratha, he now had a team to accommodate more students.The team made it a point to visit the students whenever they have a second half off, and at least once every week.
The students are currently being taught some basic concepts in Python and they’re using that as a tool to teach them about coding in general. Each of their sessions lasts two hours. The team teaches both kannada and english medium students, who are given individual attention in the program. which makes the program even more interesting since most of the students are taught and scrutinized individually almost for the time in their schooling, which has helped the faculty of the school as well as the volunteers identify potential and issues the students face and this has facilitated a better understanding among students may it be in mathematics or towards a cultivating a more positive approach towards studies itself.
They have recruited second years making it a team of 25 volunteers and they hope to have a proper teaching structure with dedicated members established by the end of 2017.The team recently had a summer coding camp for the students of the MPUC school, which was attended by over 30 students of the school and over 20 volunteer who partook in teaching them.
They hope to expand to more schools in the future with the funding they receive from The Resolution Project. Teach Code for Good also has plans to introduce E-Learning in order to be able to reach schools and students far away. we wish the best for the organisation and hope they open new doors for many more students in future.
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