Having entered in Singapore almost a decade ago, Google had shifted to a bigger office to house its growing team in November 2016.
With the announcement, it also revealed the plans to introduce the Code in the Community program in the island city in 2017. This program is specifically aimed at training about 3,000 youths from humble backgrounds in next three years.
Today, the tech giant shared the news of graduation ceremony of the program’s first cohort of 500 kids. It had conducted the ten-week program in partnership with two organizations — 21C Girls and Saturday Kids that took the classes every week. Also, it had collaborated with four self-help groups, the Chinese Development Assistance Council (CDAC), Eurasian Association, the Singapore Indian Development Association (SINDA), and Yayasan Mendaki, for making this program possible.
Senior Minister of State for Finance and Law Indranee Rajah was present at the graduation ceremony. The company notes,
In just 10 short weeks, the program has opened up the eyes of kids as young as eight years old to the opportunities that technology creates and the innovations they might be able to build with it in the future. And the best thing is that they’re having fun while doing it!
Google shared the innovation of ten-year-old Anesh Ashouk Giri and his 12-year-old sister Anesha Leoraa, who had no knowledge about coding and they started coding simple programs in a matter of few weeks. They had built a pocket-sized codeable computer using Micro:bit to control the movement of race cars on a track.
Whereas, a 13-year-old kid, Celeste Low, who had been keen on sending encrypted messages to people, as a part of her dream to be an undercover agent, made it happen. She was able to develop such a tool by the time she was done with this program.
This multi-level computer science (CS) and Science Technology Engineering Mathematics (STEM) education program is supposed to be conducted twice a year and Term 2 of is scheduled to begin in July 2017.
