Mr Gabriel Kwadwo Afram, an Information Communication Technology (ICT) Teacher at the Sunyani Senior High School (SUSEC) has implored Ghanaians to be creative in the use of technology, rather than being consumers of it.
According to him many Ghanaians have access to technology but lacked the knowledge of its usage to derive the right benefit, hence “it is essential for us to begin exploring the potentials in the technological world to derive maximum benefit for our progress.”
He cited ”tablets and other phones could be used to create games and applications to teach children which would enhance their education and performance in their future careers”.
Mr Afram was speaking to the Ghana News Agency(GNA) in an interview on the sidelines of the launching and orientation of the 2022-2024 cohort for the Scratch Education Collaborative (SEC) which was on the theme “STEM Education: The Key to Achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)” in Sunyani.
The SEC is an initiative that supports and engages participating organizations in a two-year collaborative cohort experience to strengthen their organisational commitment to implement equitable coding using Scratch and ScratchJr which is under the auspices of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The participants are engaged in a series of collaborative learning experiences that are co-developed and co-facilitated by Scratch and SEC partner organisations as they work to create self-sustaining communities and establish models for equity-centred creative coding resources.
Mr Afram, also the SUSEC’s Facilitator for the 2022-2024 SEC said his outfit in the first year of the project sought to use the Scratch programming language to solve the 17 SDGs which they have termed ”Coding for the SDGs”,
He said “we want the students to identify problems in their communities based on the SDGs and then use creative coding to create a solution to those problems which would then be posted online for people to access and use to solve the SDGs”.
At the end of the project, Mr Afram hoped SUSEC would be the Centre of computer programming at the Senior High School level in Ghana, where other schools would come and benefit from the ideas.
He commended the government for highly promoting STEM Education, saying ”Ghana has realised that we can only develop if we promote the teaching of STEM in our schools, so we want the government and the GES to put more focus and emphasis on STEM Education”.
Mr Afram lamented students’ preference for the Arts courses were becoming too much, indicating statistics in the Senior High Schools showed 80 per cent of students were pursuing Arts programmes while 20 per cent were into STEM programmes.
”How can we develop with this mindset”?, he quizzed and therefore appealed to the government to put more emphasis on STEM education, noting it is only STEM education that could push the country to the expected level of development.
Dorothy Zentigah, a second-year science 6 student in a related interview with the GNA expressed how the SEC had broadened her knowledge in the aspect of problem-solving, thinking logically and being creative on issues affecting the environment and communities.
She said the SEC programme would not only empower the science students but also broaden the knowledge base of non-science students about ICT which would expose them to coding and to become creators and problem solvers.