With the goal of pioneering the social change and development, Vodafone Turkey Foundation continues to expand the “Coding Tomorrow” project, which is established to raise a digital-future-ready generation, in the villages and the small towns of Turkey. Within the scope of the project carried out with the cooperation of Habitat Association and the supports of Ministry of Family and Social Policy, the new stop of the Coding Tomorrow Training Truck, which took the road with the aim of bringing coding training across Turkey, was Trabzon’s Bereketli Village. In the care of Provincial Directorate of National Training of Trabzon and the Municipality, nearly 150 children, aged between 7 and 14 were given coding training, the language of technology, with the training programs provided in the Coding Tomorrow Training Truck. Together with the training programs given in the Coding Tomorrow Training Truck, the total number of children who have been given coding training in Trabzon has exceeded 850 so far. With the ongoing classroom training activities in the city, is targeted to reach a total of 1,000 children. The total number of children to be reached in the Black Sea Region is 1,241.

Hasan Süel: “To provide an equal opportunity in education, we go are going to many villages and small tows in order to raise generations who knows about coding”

Coding Tomorrow Training Truck’s stop in Trabzon was Bereketli Imam Hatip Secondary School in Bereketli Village of Araklı District. Children from neighboring villages also attended the training event. Araklı District Governor V. Ömer Övünç Koşansu, Araklı Mayor Recep Çebi, Vodafone Turkey Foundation Chairman Hasan Süel and The Head of Habitat Association Chairman Sezai Hazır also watched the training and chatted with the children.

Vodafone Turkey Foundation Chairman Hasan Süel noted that they wanted a generation that does not consume but produce technology. He continued: 

“In order to produce technology, it is necessary to learn coding, which is accepted as the language of digital world. With our coding training, our children have ideas about programming, work to bring out their creativity, create their own imaginary worlds, and they can produce their own games. For them, we are opening the doors of innovative thinking. We have been continuing our project successfully for two years. In this process, we gave coding training more than 12 thousand,000 children. Our target in the new period is to reach 20,000 thousand more children. In line with this goal, we headed out with the Coding Tomorrow Training Truck. We are willing to reach as many children as possible by going to villages and small towns. As the “Coding Tomorrow” team, we have already held training events in Trabzon, in which the total number of children we have given coding training exceeded 850 until now. With the continuing training in the classrooms, we aim to reach a total of 1,000 children in Trabzon.”

The Head of Habitat Association Chairman Sezai Hazır stated:

“As Habitat Association, we have been carrying out activities in the development areas of social transformation and information for 20 years. We are a non-governmental organization working in the field of sustainable development. With ‘Coding Tomorrow’ project, we want to transform put into practice our knowledge-driven transformation through children. Knowing about coding is now as important as literacy. As in all European countries, the biggest obstacle for engaging encoding to Turkish education system is the lack of trained educators to provide this training. In this regard, we train young people within the scope of our project and they deliver their knowledge to children. With our Coding Tomorrow Training Truck, we are aiming to reach the children who cannot have such technology training in the disadvantaged regions in our country.”

Coding for Everyone

Coding Tomorrow Training Truck will cover over 6 km and reach 2.,500 children in 12 provinces in about 7 months. On the Coding Tomorrow Training Truck, which goes to villages and small towns as well as city centers, children are given 2 separate 4-hour trainings every day for 1 week long. A basic coding program called Scratch is being used in the training. It is developed for children by MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), known as the best technical university in the world. 

Target : Reaching 30 thousand children

Children between 7-14 are given coding training all across Turkey with the “Coding Tomorrow” project. Theoretical and practical training sessions are held by volunteering instructors on the subjects of introduction to programming, app making, creating stories and games. More than 12.,000 children in 30 provinces are reached from August 2016. According to the results of the first year of the project, the percentage of children who say “I can play my own game with Scratch” has increased by 31 percent. There is also a 35 percent increase in those who say “I can write harder and longer programs to solve a software problem”. In the new period, 20 thousand more children will be given coding training. Thus, more than 30,000 children in 60 provinces will be introduced with coding by the end of April 2019. New jobs will arise

According to OECD’s last report on digital economy, two out of every three children will have jobs that are unknown to us today. In the future, there will be jobs like robotics veterinary, holoportation expert, ethical hacker, emotion designer, data miner, artificial organ manufacturer, or dream facilitator. These jobs, which will be depended on coding,  will took their places in the businesses in 20 years.