Above: Shavindra Tewarie-Singh, IGT Senior Regional HR Manager (left) and Leslie Ann Baxam, Draw Coordinator Lead at IGT (right) with students during the third virtual IGT Coding and Robotics Rock! Camp.
IGT’s third virtual Coding and Robotics Rock! Camp was held from July 17 to July 28 in collaboration with the Mona Geoinformatics Institute (MGI) at the UWI, Mona, Campus. Twenty-four students from Trinidad & Tobago joined over 70 youth from five Caribbean countries in mastering new tech skills.
The IGT Coding and Robotics Rock! Camp is part of IGT’s After School Advantage (ASA) Programme, which is the company’s flagship community initiative, devoted to providing youth with access to technology while promoting opportunities in digital learning centres in communities where IGT operates. As with past iterations, the camp was offered exclusively to beneficiaries of IGT’s ASA partnerships with NGOs and community organisations throughout the Caribbean.
Young people between the ages of 11 and 18 joined the camp to understand and solve real-world problems aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) using technology. Students collaborated on group projects creating captivating websites and petitions in support of several critical SDGs that included Zero Hunger, Life Below Water, Good Health and Well-Being, Clean Water and Sanitation, Life On Land, Affordable and Clean Energy, and No Poverty. This approach aligned perfectly with the camp’s theme “Think it, Code it, Solve it.”
This year’s cohort included students from three of the 18 IGT ASA Centres in Trinidad and Tobago: Credo Boys Developmental Centre, Credo Sophia House and Cotton Tree Foundation. IGT’s training partner The Mona GeoInformatics Institute (MGI), UWI Mona Campus, delivered the camp concurrently to two learning levels over 10 days in July. New students were introduced to the fundamentals of coding and robotics in Level I, while returning students from last year’s camp joined a more advanced Level II that built upon the basics and introduced AI.
“IGT aims to continually enhance the technological awareness of the region’s young people and prepare them to contribute to the social and infrastructural development of the Caribbean. During the camp, young people from participating ASA Centres in Trinidad and Tobago were virtually connected with others from across five Caribbean countries – Barbados, Jamaica, Nevis, St. Maarten and USVI – all engaged in activities at the same time making for a very rich technological learning exchange,” shared IGT Trinidad and Tobago General Manager Dexter W. Thomas.
Feedback from the camp showed that local students enjoyed this new experience of working with youth from other Caribbean countries to build technological solutions for issues identified in the SDGs. The SDGs were adopted by the UN in 2015 as a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that by 2030 all people enjoy peace and prosperity.
Each student selected an SDG that they wanted to help solve and then worked with others in their group to code, conduct research and collect images to build a website that educated the public on their chosen topic. According to a student from Credo Sophia House, this group project was one of the best parts of the camp because she learnt how to care for the environment while also enhancing her coding skills.
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