The 2-year-old Rwanda Coding academy has reported challenges to launch its ambitious projects following COVID-19 restrictions.
The pandemic has put on hold an expansion project which will upgrade the establishment to bring it to greater standards.
It consists of construction of sixteen coding laboratories worth $6.5million at Rwanda’s first coding academy located in Nyabihu district, northern province. Completion of the project was scheduled last, but, it has not started yet.
The sixteen coding laboratories to be built in collaboration with Korean Cooperation Agency (KOICA) will include an embedded system laboratory (a microprocessor-based computer hardware system with various software), data science, and image processing laboratory, among others.
The revelation to build 16 coding laboratories was made by during a phone interview on Wednesday on 27.
“Students are in good health and their performance impressive. But, Covid-19 has put on hold some of the projects expected to boost coding including construction of 16 coding laboratories through partnership with KOICA,” Papius Niyigena, Project Manager of Rwanda coding academy told KT Press.
“I think this will become the biggest coding project in the country. The laboratories will help train students in doing various projects like in-house security (alerting people about behaviors of visitors), using the Internet of things to do various projects like web services, application protocol interface, to mention but a few,” Niyigena said.
Rwanda launched the first coding academy in 2019 with sixty students including 30 boys and 30 girls.
The academy started with finalists of senior 3 – commonly known as Ordinary level in the Rwandan education system who excelled in Mathematics, Physics, and English in the 2018 National exams.
With a motto ‘Born to Code’ the Rwanda Coding Academy was purposely built in Mukamira sector, Nyabihu district, Western Province due to the region’s favorable education environment.
According to Niyigena, all the 60 students pursuing a three-year coding course are expected to go for internship studies next year in South Korea before graduating.
