Editor’s Note: Segun Ogunlana is the CEO of Avatar Media and Technology Nigeria Limited and Founder Afripreneur and IjebuMarket. He has interest in project management, business strategy, rich and new media, marketing, and research and development. Segun is also Chemical Engineering graduate from the University of Lagos.
A video on the reality of coding staring Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Will.I.Am and Chris Bosh was aired on Tuesday, 26th of February, 2013 by Code.org. The video currently has over 5 million views. I got a Nigerian entrepreneur, Segun Ogunlana, the founder of Afripreneurial, to share his reaction to the video. Here is what he had to say:
The fun part of coding
Like Steve Jobs said, coding helps you think, which is very true. It also helps a young person develop a great organisational ability for the flow of processes in solving a problem. In as much as Zuckerberg believes it was fun, I believe the fun part only comes when your codes successfully pass the compiler/interpreter test. It is true that coding makes you think because every program you write is a problem solved. It helps to develop a mindset of solving problems.
The reality of coding to me
I first saw a computer in 1991 or 1992 when I was about 7/8 years old. It was at A.D.R.A.O International School in Victoria-Island, Lagos and the game Prince of Persia was being played by some of my mates who probbly had one at home. It was not until early 1996 that I had real personal contact with a computer, this time in O & A Academy, Ikenne-Remo, Ogun-State when I started programming in BASIC.
My first lesson was to write a program that could add 2 numbers. From then on, I kept writing programs to help with arithmetic calculations which I did regularly at break time. It got to a point when my friends asked me to help out with mathematical difficulties; I would then go to the computer room, to a particular computer, search for a particular program, run it, enter the values and get the answer.
Unlike Zuckerberg who saw it as fun, I saw it as a computer science challenge/thing as my school gave me a big A Levels CS French computer science book as my prize for being second at the end of JSS1. Boys made fun of me that I would run mad if I finished all 400 pages of the book, and I did to prove them.
The good side to it was that I saw it as a means of solving problems, but the ugly side was that everything around me returned to the dark ages as soon as I left the computer room then. Zuckerberg and I probably started programming at the same time, but while his dad got him a tutor to help him sharpen his interest, my folks here saw it as a plus to my results that I will get a good job because I was computer literate; so I went to University of Lagos to study Chemical Engineering. I somehow learnt FORTRAN and C along the way but the Nigerian reality had the upper hand.
What is the Nigerian reality?
While the class of people showcased in the video seem to be very convincing, but we in this clime need to be careful in just accepting anything. How can we think coding will be the trump card for kids in school when the education we had in the sciences in Nigeria is still yet to be relevant. What is lacking the most is support and relevant learning/application.
If we were to ask those paraded in the video their last blackout or when they did they pulled a generator last, I’m sure you will get a blank stare from even Makinde. What we should be talking about is building the proper ecosystem. We have a massive pool of young people who are older than those kids and who should pave the way.
In as much as it is good for kids to learn coding, as it sharpens their minds and makes them more determined and process organized, we should ensure they are learning it for the right reasons and we the older ones should provide an ecosystem for them to thrive.
