Ibsa, our second-year student from Ethiopia, has finished working on a coding boot camp for high school students that was organised under his Tech01 Society. Read his story about this exciting initiative that opened up the world of coding for more than 30 students!

Almost a month ago, Tech01 Society that I founded, organized a three-week free coding boot camp for high school students. More than 400 students applied and 33 got accepted - we had participants from all over the country.

The course went extremely well. While the first week was devoted to a theoretical course, the next week was full of practice and assignments. We started the week by cloning the official website of Thenx, pixel by pixel, with every little detail being explained, giving students the opportunity to follow the process along with writing the code. We made sure every student got their way around designing or cloning websites. The final assignment was to clone ITUNES in less than a week. We realised the challenge, but we believed in our participants. The result was extraordinary! All groups submitted their code with features they added, making a UI much fancier than the original site. We realized that we set them up on a good path for beginning their programming journey.

By the third week, we prepared an info session and a class devoted to sharing experience. We invited students from top universities like MIT and gave our participants some helpful information about the application process. And by the end of the program, all participants received participation certificates.

Here is what some of the participants say:

"I had a really nice and fruitful time. I learned how to create unresponsive websites and cloned my first ever website using HTML and CSS. I also communicated with other participants who had better experience and knowledge about coding. The instructors were very helpful and had adequate knowledge about the topic. It was as good as I expected." 
Amrot Abiyu Feleke, a grade 10 student from Addis Ababa

"I've learned a lot during the 3-week session. Before taking the course I had no idea about coding or programming. I was always curious about what it's like to code but didn't know where to start. And now that I've taken the course, I believe that I have good knowledge about coding and building my own website, even though there is still a lot to learn. The college application info session was also really helpful for me, especially the time we had with the MIT student!"
Betelhem Desalegn Tezera, a grade 12 student from Amhara

I have continued this activity under the Coding CAS I am currently leading here at UWC Dilijan and I hope this and the upcoming boot camps under my society will continue impacting many lives.

By Ibsa Tassew Geleta (Ethiopia, UWCD'22)