It is the dream of many secondary school students in Nigeria to gain admission into an institution of higher learning immediately after school, but not for Samson Goddy. After completing his secondary education at 16, he decided to take a break from school. In his words, “I wanted to prepare myself as a computer scientist by learning the fundamentals and I didn’t think I would achieve this in school considering the way Computer science is taught in Nigerian Universities”
Samson had been part of the One Laptop Per Child(OLPC) programme and the OLPC/ Schlumberger Excellent in Education Development (SEED) workshop in secondary school that exposed him to the digital world, technology, and programming. He soon started contributing to open source projects via Sugarlabs and got the opportunity to participate in the Exposure Robotics Academy in 2013.
His time away from school certainly paid off. Today the 18-year-old who is still planning to get his degree in Computer science is a Scratch developer and educator, a member of the oversights board of Sugarlabs, a Google Code-in mentor and a “Building African Momentum for Scratch ambassador” (#BAM4Scratch). He works with the Scratch team in Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to promote the use of Scratch in Africa.
Samson, who describes himself as “a proud Nigerian who believes he can help contribute to solving the world’s problem through computation”, is currently working on a project called “Code Builders” with Olotu square in Port Harcourt that aims to close the coding gap in primary and secondary schools. He shares the story of his recent journey to Silicon Valley in this piece.
As we continue to bemoan the poor state of computer science education in the country and the seeming inability of the government to reverse this trend, Samson’s story proves that a lot can still be done outside the formal school curriculum to nurture young children with 21st century skills that they will need to become problem solvers and survive in the digital age.
So last year on our Techpoint Innovation Tour, we kept our eye open for people and organisations who are currently making impressive strides to improve IT education for young students in the South-South and South-East..
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