The world
is changing. Today, we rely on mathematics and science in ways we could not
imagine for the past twenty-one century now. Innovations in technology help us
communicate across the globe with ease through satellites, the internet, and
cell phones and cars among others. They also help us every day to work better and
even pay bills, medical prescription, and medical translations. Advances in
medicine and science improve our health and help us to understand the world
around us. From balancing a household budget to preparing your taxes to
following a recipe, mathematics and science touch every part of our lives today
and in the future.
Think
ahead to what the world will be like when your child is an adult. What skills
will your child need to succeed in life and work in our changing world? A
strong background in mathematics and science will prepare your child for
college or work after graduation and open doors to higher paying jobs and
greater opportunity over a lifetime and help one to make the right decision
when it comes to policy making.
Lighten
creativity among the people of Africa; Aljazeera ‘Innovate Africa’ a new series
highlighting innovation and creativeness across the continent interviewed Benjamin Nortey on how use his coding
to educate people most especially the kids. Mr. Nortey believes that coding is
set to be one of the most important languages. He emphasized that across
Africa, the combination of science and technology could be the formula for
accelerating development.
Mr. Nortey
who is innovator, Founder and CEO of Metro Institute of Innovation And
Technology in Ghana, led an extra curriculum coding course for children of all
ages in order to express his passion for robotics. He said that “we want to
build a new generation people the kids in this particular generation, I think
we just don’t have to underestimate them. I mean they are so powerful, they are
smarter than their parents, they are smarter than teachers and I mean that is a
fact. They are born into technology”. He
also thinks children can build robots to solve major problem and guide the
blind.
Moving
away from the tradition style of education where a teacher stands in front of
the class and students seat to receive information, Mr. Nortey thinks robots
building work so well in how children are thinking than traditional style of
teaching in a sense that, “when it comes to robotics one thing is, if you are
going to excel in that field is that you got to have fantasy to imagine things
that doesn’t exit and try to make it happen”. He also said that, when he is
teaching the kids he does not want them to learn into vacuum he wants them to
see real life and also to appreciate mathematics. According to him Mathematics
really works and once the kids take that approach, he believes that the kids
will have that inventive mind set.
Mr. Nortey
also said that when designing game for example you need to understand physics
because the cause of principle in motion dynamics matters. He is also trying to
use Robotics as a tool to inspire study of science and mathematics to relate to
classroom theories using robots so that if when he is talking about a scientific
principles Newton’s first law of motion students shouldn’t just memorize the
facts they can actually use robots and he can demonstrate for them to see that
the law really works.
Ben
usually pay regular visit to schools across the country to drummer interest in
coding robotics. He has two thousand five hundred students across the country.
And once he exposed them to the field they always get a better idea of how to
go about building robot. Irrespective about what the kids want to do, if the
kid wants to be a politician and when they
get engaged in robotics, he/she sees technology work this way later it will
influence the kind of policy he/she makes. Most at times the kids learn and
forget everything but with robotics they want to achieve a result. And robotics
is for filing, it rewarding, they want the results and they are happy building
robots.
Most of
the materials in Ben’s lab are made from scrubs. When he is not teaching he and
his team gathers upright dumps for useful materials to build robots and they
also go for the dumps because some of them contain a lot of component needed.
He said that creating robots in West Africa is expensive because the necessary
materials used in building robots are not available.
Mr. Nortey
strongly believes that, ‘it time that we really have to redefine our
educational system. Because in Ghana I know we have been running and depending
on an old system from the British education that they put in place for us. We
really need radical change and we should be able to identify people’s interest,
passion early and then put them at the right place, give them the right stuffs
and with that they are going to excel’.
Again, he
believes that in this twenty-one century (21st), every kid must code
just as they learn basic math algebra they should know how to code so that when
they see a problem they can be able to attend to that particular problem and this
will go a long way as a nation. Because the World is moving and it is not
waiting for anybody.
Ben is
party of Ghana ongoing commitment to include ICT and robotics in the school
curricular to enable the kids study effectively irrespective of their fields.
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