10 November, 2015 – Global Peace Foundation (GPF) in collaboration with Oracle Kenya hosted 30 male students from 5 schools who participate in the Leap Hubs program by Global Peace Foundation for a Hackathon event at Oracle Offices in Nairobi. The event which attracted notable speakers from various international corporates and learning institutions; including Google and Strathmore University created a platform for the male students to showcase their innovative ideas to a panel of renowned judges from oracle’s senior employees and Global Peace Foundation. The main idea behind this was to mentor and encourage the male students to pursue courses in Computer Science as a means to contribute positively to the demands of the society in the 21st century.
In addition to this, the students got the rare chance to meet Oracle Kenya’s Country Leader, Dr. Gilbert Saggia who was recently nominated to the 2014 top 40 under 40 men in Kenya. He mentored them for over 20 minutes in an interactive session where the students bombarded him with loads of questions for inspiration. During the session, he dared the students to dream big and believe in their dreams.
Quoting Eleanor Rooseevelt he said, “The future belongs to those who believe in beauty of their dreams.”
Dr. Saggia’s mentor-ship was followed by other mentor-ship sessions conducted by other senior staff from oracle.
Later on the students were taken through the Oracle Academy Platform and were encouraged to log in to the platform and access resources available primarily on programming in languages like Java among others and also how to create oracle databases and even access Oracle Certification exams.
The climax of the event however, was reached when the students with the best presentation were awarded with goodies from oracle as an encouragement to motivate them to continue working hard. Emerging the winner, were students from Moi Forces Academy who presented an idea dabbed “Blue Drive” works as a pen drive and has the capabilities to transfer data wirelessly via Bluetooth. The drive which has a bluetooth chip embedded, allows users to save, access and transfer data by pairing the device with other blue tooth enabled devices.
This innovation amazed judged and as they considered it important in transforming how people transfer information using cloud computing. The other schools were also appreciated with small tokens and encouraged to do more research on their projects for perfection.
The five schools represent Global Peace Foundation’s robust work in establishing Leadership and Entrepreneurship Hubs (Leap Hubs) in secondary schools with the aim of equipping students with fist hand skills required to succeed in the 21st century and their ideas are a success of the impact the program has made across over 40 schools in the country.
The partnership between Global Peace Foundation and Oracle through the Oracle Academy program (the only free program offered by oracle), offers an opportunity for leap hub students to access to the Oracle Academy Online platform which contains resources in computer programming and Oracle Certification Exams.
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