Umonya: Introducing Kids to Programming

Google Tech Talk September 21, 2010 ABSTRACT Presented by Marco Gallotta. Project Umonya (www.umonya.co.za) evolved from a one-man pet project of mine, and has grown tremendously in the past 15 months. We introduce programming to school kids in an intensive weekend workshop. We chose to use Python for it's simplicity, making it possible to cover all the basics of programming in a single weekend all the way up to conditionals, loops and basic data structures. We started off in Cape Town with 45 kids in 2009 and are now expanding to 1,000 kids across South Africa in 2011 with financial assistance from Google. This talk will cover our experiences so far, the challenges faced and how we're overcoming them, what we're still busy working on and our plans to grow even further after 2011. One of our big long-term goals is taking Umonya across the South African border into other African countries. Speaker Info: Marco Gallotta is a second-time intern working on Calendar. He went from participating in the IOI and ACM ICPC to training the contestants of both competitions in parallel. He has 6 years of experience in teaching kids. He founded project Umonya in June 2009 in an effort to bring programming to the masses in South Africa. Slides: http://umonya.co.za/google_techtalk_2010.pdf Video clip of Umonya in the classroom: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwjpFw9yAGc