Roseau, Dominica – The National Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (NTRC) has successfully hosted a coding competition in honor of Girls in ICT Day 2023. The competition, which was open to female high school students between the ages of 12 and 14 saw several girls compete against each other using the CodeCombat platform.
CodeCombat is an interactive platform that provides an exciting and engaging way to teach coding skills in Python and Javascript to students as young as 6 years old. The competition aimed to encourage more young girls to take an interest in technology and pursue careers in the field of ICT.
Three teams from Arthur Waldron Seventh Day Adventist School, Convent High School, and Dominica Grammar School emerged as finalists. The girls displayed exceptional coding skills and teamwork during the competition, which impressed the judges.
After a 2-hour coding battle, the Arthur Waldron SDA School emerged as the winner of the competition in the finals held on April 27th. The team members were awarded further training on the CodeCombat platform with Code Camp Caraibe. Code Camp Caraibe is an initiative by the NTRC that provides educational programming courses.
The other two schools were also recognized for their efforts, and each was awarded a Micro:Bit controller, which can be incorporated into the school’s IT curriculum as a tool to teach more students programming.
This year’s Girls in ICT Day was celebrated under the theme “Digital Skills for Life,” highlighting the importance of digital literacy and the acquisition of digital skills in today’s world. The competition provided an opportunity for young girls to showcase their coding abilities, build their confidence, and interact with like-minded individuals.
The NTRC would like to congratulate all the participants and their schools for their hard work and dedication in making the competition a success. We hope that this event will inspire more young girls to pursue careers in ICT and become leaders in the industry.
You’d be shocked to know the majority of high positions relating to IT in the country is held by a woman. Don’t believe me? just google it. Yet I keep seeing ICT “For Girls” “For Girls” “For Girls”. Young ladies dominate every other field and also higher education. Pull up graduates from UWI from any year. If it’s 20 people, 16 are girls and 4 are boys, yet we keep pushing this for girls thing.
What is being pushed “for boys” ? Stop excluding them, boys more prone to be sitting idle on the block than girls.
MEN do the REAL work that makes society function like driving trucks, growing food, installing and maintaining heavy and dangerous equipment like the power lines and generators that make all this IT stuff possible, construction so they have a place to work, working on ocean liners to get food and such from one place to the other.
When they buy all those fancy things for the girls is mostly MEN working in the supply chain to make stuff get from point A to point B. MEN created all of this IT stuff – the first computers, the field of computer science itself, software, the internet etc etc
They are trying to push all these girls into fields where they don’t belong. Most of them end up being career women who end up at middle age in crisis because they have no children and regret wasting all their life working instead of building a family