The first stop of Coding Tomorrow Training Truck was Tekirdağ.

VODAFONE WILL GIVE CODING TRAINING TO 500 CHILDREN IN TEKİRDAĞ

Coding trainings continue in Tekirdağ with new training programs within the scope of the ”Coding Tomorrow” project, which is carried out with the aim of training a digital-future-ready generation.

In the trainings organized in Tekirdağ, which was the first stop of Training Truck, 280 children between the ages of 7 and 14 had an idea about programming and made efforts to reveal their creativity.

In Tekirdağ, a total of 500 children will be trained. Thus, together with Tekirdağ, 4,900 children will be reached in the Marmara Region.

With the goal of pioneering the social change and development, Vodafone Turkey Foundation continues the coding trainings in Tekirdağ, within the scope of the “Coding Tomorrow” project carried out with the cooperation of Habitat Association with the aim of training a digital-future-ready generation. With the new training programs given in the villages and small towns of Tekirdağ, the first stop of the Coding Tomorrow Training Truck, a total of 280 children were given training with 3 instructors for 1 week. Children Tekirdağ had an idea about programming and they made an effort to bring out their creativity.

A total of 500 children will be given coding training in Tekirdağ. Thus, together with Tekirdağ, 4,900 children will be reached in the Marmara Region.

Vodafone Turkey Foundation Chairman Hasan Süel mentioned:

We want a generation that does not consume but produce technology. With our ‘Coding Tomorrow’ project, we aim to encourage our children in coding and make them technology producers of tomorrow. According to the results of the first year of our project, we observed that our children gained important and positive changes. The percentage of children who say ‘I can play my own game with Scratch’ has increased by 31 percent. We saw a 35 percent increase in those who say ‘I can write harder and longer programs to solve a software problem’. With these results, we continue to develop and disseminate our project. In order to maintain the equality of opportunity in education, we take the road with an training truck to provide this opportunity also for children who suffer reaching coding training and live in disadvantaged areas in terms of socio-economic conditions. Our goal is to reach as many children as possible. To achieve this, we will go to the villages and small towns with our truck.”

The Head of Habitat Association Sezai Hazır said:

“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 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 it to children. With our Coding Tomorrow Training Truck, we are going to reach the children who cannot have such technology training in the disadvantaged regions of our country.”

20 thousand more children will be given coding training

Children between 7-14 are given coding training all across Turkey with the “Coding Tomorrow” project that Vodafone Turkey Foundation carries out in cooperation with Habitat Association to raise children’s awareness about coding. More than 12.000 children in 30 provinces are reached from August 2016. Within the scope of the “Coding Tomorrow” project, which is celebrating its third year, 20 thousand more children will be given coding training. Thus, more than 30,000 children from 60 provinces will be introduced with coding by the end of April 2019.

Training Truck will reach 5 thousand children in 12 provinces

Coding Tomorrow Training Truck, which is prepared by Vodafone Turkey Foundation in order to bring coding training to all over the country, will reach 5 thousand children in 12 provinces in about 7 months. After Tekirdağ, Coding Tomorrow Training Truck will go to Sinop, Ordu, Sivas, Erzincan, Şırnak, Mardin, Gaziantep, Adana, Antalya, İzmir, and Çanakkale, covering 6.080 km. On the Coding Tomorrow Training Truck, children will be given 2 separate 4-hour Scratch trainings every day for 1 week long.

MIT’s program is being used

Within the scope of “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. Developed for children by MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), the best technical university in the world, the basic coding program Scratch is being used in the training.

“Coding Tomorrow” set an example to the world

“Coding Tomorrow” project is featured in Vodafone Group’s “Connected Education” report as a success story, and has set an example to the world in digital literacy with its sustainable education model. “Connected Education” report presents the initiatives led by Vodafone in an effort to facilitate digitization in education across the world, and covers 14 different initiatives under 4 main themes, that are “Access to Online Education Platforms/Apps”, “Digital Literacy Education”, “Educating the Educators”, and “Education In Refugee Camps”. With the spread of the digital initiatives that are mentioned in the “Connected Education” report in countries and markets in which Vodafone operates, it will be possible to reach more than 85 million people by the year 2025, and to achieve an economic benefit of 7,3 billion dollars annually.

Future jobs will be based on coding

As the “language” of the digital world, coding improves children’s creativity and teaches them innovative thinking. 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 utopian-sounding jobs will have places in corporations in 20 years, and they will all be based on coding.