IBM, EDC spearhead innovation boot camp

About 600 senior high school students in Cebu will be made ready to compete in the cognitive era as participants in the upcoming Cebu Innovation Boot Camp.

Organized by IBM, in partnership with Education Development Center (EDC), the Boot Camp will run for two years starting November this year.

"The Cebu Innovation Boot Camp aims to promote the readiness of the youth for employment and to increase their competitiveness in the workplace by strongly demonstrating both their technical and work readiness skills," said IBM Philippines president and country manager Luis Pineda.

Five public schools in Cebu have been selected to participate in this Boot Camp, said EDC Philippines country manager of project AWARE, Angelique Roux.

The Boot Camp is in line with IBM’s focus on disruptive technologies to accelerate innovation, as well as to IBM’s corporate social responsibility program’s focus to strengthen K-12 education, Pineda said.

In this particular partnership with EDC, IBM will enable high school students solve real problems by developing and deploying applications using the IBM Bluemix cloud platform - a modular set of infrastructure services where they can scale on virtual servers and build micro-services with event-driven models.

"Their training will include master classes to familiarize them first with the latest information technologies, ideation sessions to let them apply what they’ve learned, prototyping a model of their solution, and finally for them to pitch their solution to a panel of judges for evaluation," he added.

Aside from EDC, IBM is also working closely with the Metro Cebu Development and Coordinating Board, Department of Education, and the Department of Information and Communication Technology.

According to Pineda, IBM is looking forward to the success of the Cebu Innovation Boot Camp.

Its success will help Cebu's youth in becoming more competitive in the workplace in the cognitive era, Pineda concluded.