PESHAWAR: As part of promoting market-oriented digital skills among school students in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, over 3,000 students from grade 6th to 9th have been trained in software programming under the Early Age Programming (EAP) initiative launched by the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa IT Board (KPITB) in collaboration with the Elementary and Secondary Education Department.

After completion of first phase of the initiative in which students from 60 government schools in 14 districts got training, the second phase has been initiated in which 15,000 students will be selected from 300 government schools of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, according to a statement issued here.

EAP manager Zeeshan Khan stated that over 3,000 apps and games software had been developed by students in the first phase.

Currently, 45-90 willing students are selected from every school who not only play games on smartphones, but are also taught to develop games and applications.

“Coding is not part of the curriculum anywhere in Pakistan. Spread over eight months, the curriculum is designed by Code.Org and MIT Scratch which is the same curriculum adopted globally,” he said.

Trainers from the IT board teach the programming and coding in an interactive manner, he said.

Commenting on the initiative, Minister for Elementary and Secondary Education Atif Khan stated that the best way for Pakistan to prosper was to equip the children with modern technology and that was the top priority of the provincial government.

“Our kids are our future and we want to empower our future with the right kind of technology and skills. Every child in the future will be successful if they are powerful users of technology that surrounds us,” he added.

Under a similar initiative of KPITB, the first phase of Youth Employment Programme (YEP) has trained 2,100 students in various courses, including game development, digital business communication, blogging, content writing, etc.

Published in Dawn, January 18th, 2018