What if your teenage son or daughter was able to open up your computer at home, and he or she was able to understand and explain to you the use of each parts the intricate circuitry which exists in the central processing unit? Well, that's what the Public Utilities Commission intends to foster, young scholars who are computer savvy, with the hope of one day seeing a Belizean Bill Gates of Steve Jobs, both known in the world's technology industry as computer inventing pioneers who became billionaires.
So, they've invested almost a quarter million dollars in acquiring innovative simple computers to train the students about the basics of computer engineering. The commission hosted a press conference to explain how they will go about trying to boost the computer technology classes that your high schooler currently receives.
The Chairman explained that the computer system that they've purchased to use as teaching tools is called the Raspberry Pi (Pie). Here's his comments on the topic:
John Avery - Chairman, PUC
"We've chosen the Raspberry Pi. It's a small computer platform, very affordable and we've chosen that as a teaching tool for teachers and for students at the high school level for this program, to incorporate into their ICT curriculum at the high schools, so that students become more familiar with the computer as a building block as opposed to just a tool to be use to solve problems involving data and that sort of thing or simply as a tool for accessing information on the internet. We want to encourage people to use computers to actually build new devices, new systems, new platforms."
Darwin Lewis - Consultant
"Most kids when they get a laptop, they can't really do anything much with it, in terms of digging in. And as you know most of the geniuses we have today, the Elon Musk, Steve Jobs - these people grew up digging in into computers, figuring out how they work and as more and more of the complexity was built into the computer, that ability to become curious and to dig in was lost. So the Raspberry platform allows young minds to actually interact with a computer. Not only to program it, but to actually do things like ad sensors to it; allow them to get the temperature of a room; allow them to on a sense whereby if you are walking, it can detect motion and it can say something or do something."
John Avery - Chairman, PUC
"We want to encourage job creators in our country, not just job seekers and we are hoping that with this program we are doing that we can open the eyes of young people of Belize to all the possibilities that exists."
The first part of the process is to train the teachers of the 47 high schools countrywide who have already signed up with great interest in this pilot program. They will then take the skills and technology back to their school, and impart the knowledge to their students. They will be given 5 of the raspberry pi units, and the PUC will monitor their progress. To ensure there is brainstorming, innovation and invention taking place, the PUC will hold competitions in which the most advanced projects created from these computers will be honored. The project starts officially on Next week Monday.
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