IT career put in Pacific children’s sights
A SELFCONFESSED IT geek has set up a children’s coding club as part of his mission to give more Pasifika youngsters the opportunity to get into a career in IT.
Ron Amosa, who has Samoan, Tuvaluan and Chinese ancestry, says he rarely sees other Pacific people in the tech roles that make up the highpaying end of the IT industry and he wants that to change.
Every Wednesday afternoon up to 10 children gather at Rosebank School in Avondale, Auckland for Coding Club.
They are from different backgrounds — and are all welcome — but Pasifika children are at the heart of Mr Amosa’s mission.
There were sometimes preconceived expectations that they would be mostly into sport and music, he said.
‘‘The funny thing is I do sport, I do music, but I do IT as well,’’ he said.
‘‘I’m sure that not every Island kid out there is a sports jock or a creative muso. I’m sure there are heaps of geek Islander kids out there as well. Like me.’’
Mr Amosa started his mission last year, buying 10 secondhand computers himself and spending the weekend refitting them for their new purpose.
He then began the search for a venue. Rosebank School came on board, and Coding Club has met every Wednesday for the past two terms.
The cute crew work to code games, calling on Mr Amosa’s expertise — and those of his volunteer helpers — as they do.
Coding Club member Daezharn was chuffed to have learnt to hack the coding system a little.
The work took perseverance and had taught her patience, she said.
‘‘When it’s annoying and you get really annoyed, you feel like you don’t want to do it again. When it’s right, you’re like — yas! Then I still want to do it, she said.
Another coder, Ally, already had an idea of what she wanted to do when she grew up. ‘‘Kind of what Ron does . . . That’s what I mainly go for in my goals,’’ she said.
And Davey had more motivation to encourage more children to attend.
‘‘It’s fun and you get free snacks,’’ he said.
Mr Amosa’s mission was inspired by firsthand experience.
‘‘I’ve been working in IT for the better part of two decades now. I don’t see many, if any, other Islanders in my space — in the engineering space, in the system administration space, where the bigger salaries are. Nobody,’’ he said.
And as more jobs were lost to computers, he wanted to see the Pacific community front and centre in the jobs that would replace them.
He hoped to one day see Pasifika people in stock images of IT professionals or a lavalavaclad character jumping kava bowls in a video game.
‘‘If I can expose these kids to IT through making games and websites and electronics and robots — and if that plants a seed then that grows something later on — then I guess that was a success,’’ he said.
‘‘That’s the dream anyway.’’ —