He teaches kids to make games rather than play them
The idea is to teach children more practical-based subjects instead of just theories and theoretical subjects that won’t be of much use to them in the near future.”
Omar Farooqui, Saudi national
Dubai resident Omar Farooqui, a Saudi national, was an investment banker two years ago, but his son inspired him to start something of a movement here in Dubai. He founded what he calls the Uber or Careem of education and named his alternative education company Coded Minds, wherein he and his team of 20-25 young teachers partner with schools and provide them with coding courses on their premises.
Since the time his son started schooling in the US, Omar said he noticed a marked difference in his computer skills. “My son turned into a computer whiz and a very smart hacker. And I noticed a lot of flourishing coding academies in the US, which made me realise that it was important to develop these skills in our students, because 20 years from now, if our graduates do not have these hands-on computer skills, then they might not be part of the job force.
“Coding teaches you logic, critical thinking and creativity. It teaches a child to be creative by himself instead of being told what to do. It ends up being a lot of fun and learning, too. Therefore, we decided to teach children computer programming in a practical way,” said Omar.
“In this region, we focus on the different types of creative, high-tech products but we have not yet focused on how to impart that technical education to our students to make those products.”
Omar and his team developed 35 in-house coding courses for students in the age group 4-16, where students are thrown at the deep end of technology and they learn, create and innovate by working on different projects using these courses.
Coded Minds, licensed by the Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA), has now educated over 500 children on different levels of computing, coding, and robotics in a way that they are now able to invent new apps and programmes for practical use.
A unique part of this educational model is that Omar formed his team of teachers differently. “All our teachers are under the age of 25 and are mainly young graduates from the local universities. I chose a set of 20-25 young teachers with different ethnic backgrounds, with fresh ideas in their minds and who all have studied computer science at college.”
Also, the teachers are deliberately kept parttime so it allows them the flexibility of work as a lot of them are students at universities. “This way, they are not only getting a chance to put to practice the theory they learned at college but also are earning an extra buck — depending on the subjects they teach and hours they put in.”
The courses are all in the form of practicals and projects wherein children are split in different age groups and then grouped together to make projects — such as websites, apps, games, programming, artificial intelligence, robotics, and other e-business expertise.
The courses teach children to use their hands and minds to make stuff and at the end of each course (eight weeks long), the children have an objective to achieve and they present it to the teachers and their parents.
“We did an experiment last year where a seven-year-old child invented a chat application after our course. So the idea is to teach children more practical-based subjects instead of just theories and theoretical subjects that won’t be of much use to them in the near future.”
After surveying schools and seeing what they offer, Omar said: “I felt that although schools here teach computers, it’s not at the level they should be teaching. Not offering this future education would make them lag behind.”
Omar wanted to impact lives and offer something to people that was not offered in this part of the world. The project has taken off in Dubai like a phenomenon and is now running in about 25 Dubai schools.
“We will soon add engineering at kids level and aim to make education what it should be and not what it is today,” Omar said.