Empowering kids for sustainable development goals
In modern world, every day technology amazes us, self-driving cars and robots replacing pharmacy technicians, lawyers and even baristas are becoming the norm in industries. This might be a threat for human professionals, but it is also opening new opportunities to other careers, like software programming, which is the heart of artificial intelligence and machine programming.
For Horizon Empowers, provide such quality of skills to children and youth at risk is crucial for them to have an adult decent life. In Honduras, as part of a self-sustainability strategy, there is a Christian bilingual School with more than 400 students, and thanks to our sponsors, it was equipped with good computers. And the fruits for this investment are abundant. Recently, students from Academia La Providencia won two third places in the International Olympics Code Monkey 2023, which was focused on the United Nation´s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG).
This is a competition organized by Code Monkey, an online platform adopted in La Providencia to teach coding languages, block-based and text-based coding using an engaging game-like environment, and also, it is an award-winning program. For Davinia Reyes, Computer Teacher, this is very important: “Graduates will have excellent coding skills, when in university, they will learn easily how to program Apps. Even from Honduras, they can work remotely for companies like Rockstar, sending codes for games for example. Programming also develops other skills like logical thinking, decision making, grammar and graphic design.”
Discovering exciting careers
Only two teams were allowed to participate and contestants were Ismael Mendoza, John Miller, Rubén Suazo and Elena Muñoz. The challenge was to build a game based in one goal (SDG) and the winners of third places were Ismael Mendoza (SDG 1 No Poverty) and John Miller (SDG 14 Life Below Water). For Ismael, family was his inspiration: “My dad grew up in a poor place, he studied and now he has his own enterprise, that´s why I made a game where little monkey was passing grades and getting certificates for every new skill, so, he could end his poverty. I would like to create videos as a profession.” By this way, Horizon Empowers is helping children to find their purposes for their future life.