LOCAL WINNER
Beginner Awards: Disruptive technology
KOIT
Solution details
KOIT is a programming learning platform. KOIT's curriculum starts with an introductory course to the basics of programming, that is taught in a classroom with a real teacher, on our web-platform. The study material is interactive and engaging for the students, both the theory and the tasks. After their first taste of IT, we help students find out what part of IT they like most and allow them to further learn about that both theoretically and practically by completing projects. The end goal of the student would be to impress our partnering IT companies with their portfolios and experiences to score an internship opportunity.
Tweet / Slogan
KOIT is the platform, where students learn programming, all the way from their first lines of code at school, up until getting their first internship.
KOIT
Context
On the education side of things, there is a lack of high quality programming study materials that make programming interesting for (high-school) students. The IT job market is in dire need of specialists, but there is a problem in higher education with high dropout rates.
Impact
This learning path can keep the student busy for many months, given we develop enough content. In the long-term, we aim to provide long-term value to the students, teachers and the IT-companies by connecting the three stakeholders for long-term connections. One potential way to measure our long-term impact is to find the number of KOIT students working in IT companies. Short-term impact is more difficult to measure, but given a big enough sample size, we can gather feedback from schools, teachers and students. The adoption rate of our platform can also be a form of feedback and impact.
Team work
Our entire team consists of either current high-schoolers or recent graduates of high school. That means that we have personally experienced the problem, but despite that we have many years of experience with IT already on real projects and real companies. We started this idea in the beginning of this year and will continue in the future.
Team members: Kevin Akkermann, Alberto Ginel and Arto Reinik.
Innovativeness
There is a really saturated market of self-study programming platforms starting from the very basics. We believe that students' first contact with programming should be physically in a classroom with a teacher. Other platforms do not stick around high-school students, teens with many choices in their lives, to help them find an internship.
Transferability
Although we take a country-local approach to programming learning, this model can easily be adapted to fit different cultures, countries, languages or school systems. We just need to get local schools/teachers to use our platform and companies to provide collaboration possibilities for the students.
Sustainability
In the mid-to-long term, we want to validate our idea of helping students get real-life programming experience from companies and projects. After that, both vertical and horizontal scaling is pretty straight forward after testing in Estonia.