Ministry begins robotic, coding training for coaches of Unity Colleges

The Ministry of Education has started a five-day training workshop on robotics and coding for coaches of the Federal Unity Colleges (FUCs). The training is in conjunction with Coderina Education and Technology Foundation and the Continuing Professional Development (CPD) scheme of the Technology and Service Education Development.

Gathered at the Queens College, Lagos on Monday, to fomalise the training, the coaches expressed optimism about the impact they expect the programme to have on them and their works.

Declaring open the event, the Director, Technology and Science Education Department, Federal Ministry of Education, Mrs. Elizabeth Adedigba, said the objective of the training was to empower the teachers on coding and robotics so that they can train their students for national and international competitions.

Adedigba said the training was designed for teachers in preparation for the 2021/2022 yearly challenge titled: Cargo Connect.

She said the goal of this year’s theme was to research how to shape a better future for everyone and the use of teamwork and imagination to build a better tomorrow together.

According to her, coding and robotics are the future of the whole world and “our students cannot be left behind. All they need is an enabling environment and you would see great ideas that can solve our day to day problems.”

Adedigba said it is worthy of note that this coding and robotics programme started with 19 Federal Unity Colleges and the successful results and learning outcomes realised through the pilot programme influenced the directive of the Permanent Secretary that all 104 Federal Unity Colleges should key into the programme.

She used the occasion to direct principals to include the cost implication of the engagement in their yearly budget and also to ensure that they register and procure the robotic kits to participate in both yearly national and international competitions.

The Principal, Queens college Yaba and Chairman FUCs Nigeria, Dr. Mrs. Tokunbo Yakubu-Oyinloye, who said that the competitions Nigerian students have been part of, has shown that they can compete with their counterparts across the world, commended the Ministry of Education for the initiative in the past three years of the workshop.

She added:” Robotics and coding are what is being used now in most industries to ensure that work is being done faster, easier and in safer ways.”

The Chairman, Board of Trustees, Coderina Education and Technology Foundation, Femi Niyi, said Coderina looks to transforming education with the First Lego League (FLL) which is a project-based robotics programming program that teaches kids how to use technology to solve present-day challenges.

According to him, last year, Queens College came first and also won an award for Nigeria in Greece out of 113 countries, which by the way was the first time Nigeria took part in the program.

Meanwhile, participating Nigerian students would apply research and robotics in the FLL challenge.

Each year the FLL team come together to announce and unveil a brand-new season the robotics championship, where over 500,000 young learners from 115 countries around the world come together to participate. In Nigeria, this includes 1,500 students from 150 teams made up of students from all 109 FUCs as well as other state and private secondary schools.