Children’s Creativity Lab; a project of Creativity lab ltd; initiated to introduce children aged between 7-13 years old to the world of computer science, engineering, electronics and robotics, is helping children learn coding at very young age.

The lab helps children do different experiments and innovation during our weekend program, school program where their visit schools and teach children and holidays program in which parents take their children to the lab to learn.”

“We teach children design thinking. How they can use their skills to solve community’s problems. We are giving skills to the future engineers and innovators. Acquiring knowledge at young age is a good thing because children have facilities and time to learn.” Ildephonse Mungwarakarama is the Manager of Children’s Creativity Lab, says.  

Cristella Uwiduhaye, 13, is a Primary Six pupil at High Hills Academy located in Kicukiro District. Since her childhood she has always had the urge to become an engineer. However, the foundation she is supposed to receive as a child is not enough at school due to the limited time for practical sessions.

“When you learn without practice what you hear is more like a distant dream. You can’t figure out how that happens in the real world. Even your imagination remains dormant because it is not nourished. Now with the creativity lab, I feel more inspired to pursue my dream career in engineering. With the materials here, I do a lot of practices and explore my inner potentials. I have learnt how to create computer-based animations, an electricity circuit and I’m excited to learn more as time goes on,” Cristella told The New Times.

Keza Benigne; is a student at Fruit of Hope Academy; with 11 years of age appreciates skills acquired from  Children’s Creativity Lab and says she thought of developing a solution on irrigation.

“When it is sunny season, many farmers are not able to make irrigation so that they get enough production, I thought of a technology that would help farmers make irrigation.”

Courses offered at Children’s Creativity Lab focus on computer Science, engineering and robotics. In computer science, Chilrdren get trained on Introduction to computer, parts of computer: hardware, operating system, Microsoft word and programming. Also, they get introduced to HTML and internet. In robotics; they learn how them how they can build their own robots and how to control them.

Started in February 2018, with the weekend program only, but as the project kept growing the school program was adopted. Today, Children Creativity Lab works with five (5) schools in Kigali, and 160 students benefit from the program.

“There is an impact, children learn from their schools but do not get much time for practice. Here, we give them a space to express themselves. And we show them how to use the skills acquired to solve the community problems. We have seen tremendous solutions; many of them are similar to those of universities’ students.” Ildephonse added.