Winter School for Programming: Teaching students Computational Skills

CLIENT
The University of Venda
sector
Education
Read time
5 Mins
Overview
The Challenge
The Solution
The Results
The numbers

The Challenge

The Department of Mathematical and Computational Sciences hosted a Winter School with the aim of gradually introducing students to the basics of programming using MATLAB in an accessible manner, offering both theoretical foundations and guided demonstrations with practical exercises. ​

“With the current push towards the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) and digitization, there is a growing need in Southern Africa for computational thinking and programming skills in academic programs and industries.”

The Solution

Prof Ndivhuwo Ndou partnered with Opti-Num Solutions to develop the curriculum of the Winter School. The course made extensive use of the Campus-Wide License resources and ease of use of MATLAB. It included fundamentals of programming, specifically, ​

  • Vectors, matrices, and arrays; ​
  • Relational and logical operators; ​
  • Control flows (loops and if conditions) and functions​
  • Graph visualization.​

Additionally Opti-Num delivered a  Graduate Employability seminar which drove home industry expectations of workplace skills, echoing Prof Ndou’s insights on the need for computational thinking and programming skills.

The Outcome

Prof Ndou successfully led the implementation and delivery of the school which saw several positive outcomes: ​

  • Attendance of 150 science students, (1st, 2nd, and 3rd years) from the Faculty of Science, Engineering and Agriculture.​
  • Due to significant student interest, the department plans to integrate programming into the Mathematics curriculum. ​
  • A further goal will be to host the Winter School annually until programming are fully integrated into the curriculum. ​

“The Winter School exceeded our expectations… the numbers at our Winter School increased each day, surpassing the venue’s capacity were some students ended up attending from outside the venue and some via Microsoft teams.”

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