Jesse Ramdeo

A dig­i­tal in­clu­sion and in­no­va­tion for change pro­gramme host­ed by Glass­wings In­ter­na­tion­al and Citi, cul­mi­nat­ed on Thurs­day with a grand com­pe­ti­tion for stu­dents, with two win­ning schools cop­ping $10,000 which can be used to­wards a project aimed at com­bat­ing a school or com­mu­ni­ty is­sue.

Stu­dents from the three par­tic­i­pat­ing schools—Barataria South Sec­ondary, Cara­pichaima East Sec­ondary and the Kwame Ture Ed­u­ca­tion­al Cen­tre—as­sem­bled at the Pleas­antville In­door Re­gion­al Fa­cil­i­ty to dis­play their un­der­stand­ing of ro­bot­ics, cod­ing and drone tech­nol­o­gy.

Kwame Ture Ed­u­ca­tion­al Cen­tre and Cara­pichaima East Sec­ondary even­tu­al­ly won a $10,000 top prize.

Coun­try co-or­di­na­tor for Glass­wings In­ter­na­tion­al, Nigel For­ge­nie, said the pro­gramme was de­signed for stu­dents to get an im­mer­sive ex­pe­ri­ence in dig­i­tal in­no­va­tion while de­vel­op­ing strate­gic plans to ad­dress prob­lems im­pact­ing so­ci­ety.

He said, “We thought about do­ing cod­ing and to code, we used drone tech­nol­o­gy, so there is an easy cor­re­la­tion be­tween the cod­ing and some­thing they can see vi­su­al­ly...so they would have learnt a lit­tle bit about physics in terms of aero­dy­nam­ics, a lit­tle about weath­er and mi­crom­e­te­o­rol­o­gy and so they would have learnt a se­ries of skills.”

For­ge­nie said stu­dents were al­so tasked with de­vel­op­ing a project to solve so­cial ills.

Stu­dents opt­ed to use drone tech­nol­o­gy to com­bat school vi­o­lence and en­vi­ron­men­tal haz­ards, as well as de­vel­op a sus­tain­able agri­cul­tur­al plan.

He said it was crit­i­cal to en­sure this coun­try was not left be­hind in an evolv­ing dig­i­tal era.

“Enough is not be­ing done be­cause there is no con­nec­tiv­i­ty be­tween what the stu­dents spend most of their time do­ing and what is be­ing taught in our ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem,” For­ge­nie said.

For­ge­nie said au­thor­i­ties have so far failed to bridge the gap be­tween youth and tech­nol­o­gy in a sus­tain­able man­ner.

“They live on their tablets, live on their com­put­ers but we have not yet been able to trans­form that in­to the class­room in a very ef­fec­tive way and so one of the things we are look­ing at is how to im­prove that,” he said.