Out-of-school youths to receive STEM & Robotics training

A cadre of local youth volunteers residing in various communities in Regions 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 10 will serve as resource persons for a series of STEM and Robotics training programmes scheduled to begin in December.
The participants are young people who are out of school but are as yet unattached. The training will begin by educating the youths on STEM (Science, Technology Engineering and Mathematics initially) along with Robotics and coding/computer programming.
This ground-breaking programme is an initiative of the Department of Culture, Youth and Sport, and the ultimate objective is to equip more young people with marketable skills that would render them employable.
In the longer term, the ultimate objective is to have those young people teaching

the Robotics and STEM skills they have learnt to other students.
The Department of Culture is collaborating with the Public Telecommunications Ministry, the Education Ministry and STEMGuyana to teach Robotics to Guyanese students. The main organisers met last Thursday to refine the training programme and its logistics, which include identifying the regional ICT hubs that would be used as training venues, and the schedule for meeting with the regional Community Development Officers.
The latter, who are all attached to the Ministry of Public Telecommunications (MoPT), would be required to manage the programme’s logistics in their respective regions, which include ensuring that the training modules are loaded onto the computers in the ICT hubs, and transporting participants to the training venues.
STEMGuyana drafted the training curriculum, which hinges on computer coding, Scratch programming, building and programming robots, and mathematics using the National Grade Six Assessment (NGSA) syllabus.
This is also the beginning of what the organisers hope would become a series of training interventions leading to entering highly skilled Guyanese teams into the annual International Robotics Olympics.
Scratch is a programming language and online community where technology students receive assistance to create their own interactive stories, games, and animations.
The organisers expect the participants and facilitators to later establish tech(nology) clubs for primary, secondary and adult students in their communities. In February this year, STEMGuyana trained and certified approximately 50 youth leaders and teachers, and encouraged them to start technology clubs in their communities.
That STEM certification programme was the beginning of many outreaches that STEMGuyana has conducted in Guyana through various Ministries and through the Office of the First Lady, Sandra Granger.
STEMGuyana is led by Leon Caleb Christian; Karen Abrams, a Start-up Inclusion Consultant; and Ima Christian.