Enrol children for robotics, coding training this holiday

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Third-term holidays are long enough for children to train in robotics and coding for parents who want to prepare children for careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics).

Arinaitwe Rugyendo, the founder of the Young Engineers STEM Education Programme, says teaching coding or robotics to young people, including four-year-olds, nurtures their capacity to absorb new concepts.

“The training stimulates their cognitive development, enhances their creativity, and fosters a sense of curiosity and innovation,” he explains.

Rugyendo says children engaged in such activities gain resilience, confidence, higher-order thinking, and learn essential problem-solving skills.

“We must also remember the consequences of the industrial revolutions, in which many professions vanished very quickly from the labour market.  Similarly, now, as we enter the 4th and 5th industrial revolutions or the engineering era, the effect is going to be much stronger. As time passes by, there are fewer and fewer tasks and services that a robot cannot do better than us human beings,” he says.

Rugyendo says robots are doing everything with precision. “They can work for many hours, for many shifts, they never get tired, they never complain, they never ask for a salary increase. If they get broken, it’s not so bad, they can easily get duplicated or repaired. What this means is that soon, we will see less and less from current occupations that exist today.”

ISBAT University head of marketing Fahad Musa agrees with Rugyendo. He says: "Technology is here to stay. There's nothing we can do about that. All we need to do is to embrace it, utilise it, and be able to give birth to so many opportunities, and those opportunities can only be made by investments such as this," he added.