In 2015 I lucky to be invited by the FemEng (Female Engineering) society from University of Glasgow to help them organise their first edition of “FemEng in Rwanda” project. We collaborated with students from University of Rwanda in Kigali and organised workshops about science and engineering for school girls in the Kigali area.

With the mix of aspiring engineers specialising in different fields we created workshops about Biomedical, Mechanical, Civil, Aerospace and Software engineering. As well as Product Design and Renewable Energy and Water engineering. As the only software engineer on the team, I was responsible for running the Software Engineering workshop. Thanks to the University of Rwanda we were able to run the workshop at the computer science lab on campus. I decided to give a short presentation about computer science, programming and different career paths. Then a quick intro to Scratch programming followed by a hands on programming session using Scratch. It was incredible to see the girls being excited about their programs running and doing different things on the screen as well as playing sounds. Some of the participants of the workshop never used a computer before and it was incredible to see how quickly they could pick up Scratch.

Overall we delivered the workshops to over 500 students in multiple schools across Rwanda. About 150 students participated in the Software Engineering workshop. I was thrilled when some of the girls came up to me after the workshop asking me more questions about programming, where can they continue learning about it and what should they focus on at school in order to study Computer Science one day. What an incredible feeling to aspire others!

In our free time we got to see a bit of Rwanda. The best trip was definitely the safari where we got to see girafes, elephants, hippos and loads of other animals. Finally, we made great friends in Rwanda and learned about each others cultures.

Since the first edition of the project in 2016, it continued to grow and now takes place every year. To find out more, check out this website.