Ed-tech initiative to empower children with future skills

Islamabad: An educational technology (ed-tech) initiative has been launched in the Islamabad Capital Territory to empower children with future skills.

"We're working on coding and developing tools and technologies-based computer science curriculum for the early years (grade 1-8). The initiative is meant to envision the children of Pakistan to be creators of technology. It will empower the children with future skills such as analytical thinking, problem-solving, algorithm designing and computer programming," Technoknowledge CEO and founder Romana Rafi told reporters.

According to her, Technoknowledge has designed the pilot curriculum of “Early Age Programming” for Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa to inculcate coding in the existing curriculum of public sector schools. "Across Pakistan, we have trained 7,000 children in this curriculum in the various school systems since March 2021."

Romana Rafi said Technoknowledge was now working as the team leader to develop a computer science curriculum framework around coding for Single National Curriculum. She said for the successful implementation of the Early Year Computer Science Curriculum, teachers were one of the major stakeholders to be trained on the coding and developing technologies and help educational institutes in capacity building.

"In order to manifest the vision, we are offering free teachers’ training with the support of the Federal Directorate of Education for two model colleges of Islamabad. This training is for 40 hours on various internationally recognised tools and technologies and will help them to incorporate these technologies into the existing curriculum.

"Teachers will be able to do computational thinking, design various algorithms and code various applications by using different tools. They will also be trained to transfer this knowledge and vision to empower young students. This programme will be rolled out for 1400 students of the above-mentioned schools as a pilot project for session January 2022 till August 2022," she said.