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For a few weeks now, I have been floating this idea at the back of my mind; how can the government accelerate Computer Science education? I think I may have stumbled on a model, that if applied well can work.
The vast majority of the CS lecturers today in most Nigerian universities are out of touch. May or may not be their fault. But the reality is that there are just out of touch. How can we solve this?
Here are my thoughts; they are a number of Nigerian software companies here doing amazing things and the a good number of these companies have really smart people who love teaching. I do.
Wouldn't it be nice it the school run some sort of exchange programme with these companies? For instance, company A sends say 2 of their people to school X. School X pays the salary of that person for a semester and this person in turn teaches in school X...
The beautiful thing here is that the person teaching isn't just reading out to the students. (S)he is bringing relevant experience, tried and tested method into the classroom. The students gets an opportunity to engage with an industry practitioner.
If this becomes the case, and let's say students get this opportunity from second year, by the time they are ready for internship in year 3, they already have a fair knowledge of what's expected from them.
The company can also spot outstanding students and begin to groom them. When these students are done with school, these companies already have a steady pipeline of junior developers ready to add value.
Every other day, engineers are leaving en masse and no one can stop that, but something can be done about the pipeline. We may just end up becoming a conduit for exporting amazing engineering talents to the world.
I, for one, will really love to go reach CS in my alma mata - University of Calabar.
