85 secondary school students and teachers benefit from UNESCO Office in Beirut and LAU Youth Coding Programme
Teachers and students cheering after receiving their certificates at LAU in Beirut © UNESCO Beirut 2015
As part of the YouthMobile initiative, UNESCO Office in Beirut and the Lebanese American University in Beirut (LAU) concluded today, a series of trainings for teachers, and secondary school students, in an effort to integrate programming skills and computing thinking concepts in the education system in Lebanon.
85 participants gathered today, 5 December 2015, in LAU campus in Beirut for a special ceremony organized to mark the conclusion of this programme's training activities, that has started in October 2015.
In this context, 15 teachers participated in a training workshops held during October 2015, while 70 secondary school students participated in 3 workshops between October and December 2015. Participants were selected giving particular attention to both less privileged communities and female students.
UNESCO-LAU Youth Coding Programme comes as an outcome of UNESCO’s YouthMobile that builds on the experience of many worldwide initiatives to introduce young people to programming (learning-to- code) and problem solving (coding-to-learn). It also seeks to build on experiences targeting young women who are vastly under-represented in this field.
This programme also aims to reach out to a wide range of schools in Lebanon through awareness campaigns, technical training workshops, as well as competitions. Statistics show universities in the Arab World have less than 20% of the students majoring in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) are females. Through this programme, UNESCO and LAU hope to attract and motivate more Lebanese females to computing-related fields at universities.
In addition, UNESCO & LAU launched a Mobile App Development Contest for secondary schools students and its results will be announced end of March 2016. More on the criteria and applying can be found on the project’s page: http://lau.edu/youthcoding .
UNESCO’s Youthmobile initiative is a new endeavour that targets engaging young women and men to develop mobile applications, in a time when the number of smart phones is rising exceptionally in developing countries. Realizing the major employment opportunities that are created by teaching students to develop mobile applications, UNESCO and its partners strive to provide young people with the high-level skills and confidence to develop, promote, and sell locally relevant mobile apps. Those apps, directly related to everyday problems, are intended to solve local issues of sustainable development, and provide employment. Under this programme, UNESCO provides multi-lingual training materials, training of youth trainers and teachers, while also creating the first global mobile application competition for additional motivation.
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