BrainBasket Foundation, a Ukrainian NGO dedicated to IT education, has announced a new venture — a nationwide social education project to retrain school teachers of computer science for free and turn them into “agents of change.” The project will kick off this month.
The teachers will study, in particular, HTML/CSS and website-development. They will receive a monetary reward from the Foundation.
The Foundation also announced the completion of the first stage of its national education program Technology Nation. The next stage of the project will begin this month across Ukraine.
Offered free of charge, the program combines courses on programming from leading international technology universities, including Harvard and the MIT, with practical exercises led by experienced mentors.
Since its start in 2016, 3,040 participants have been enrolled in the program. Over half of them (52%) have completed the course successfully. Overall, 60 educational hubs in 37 cities have been equipped with computers and furniture, while 97 IT specialists and teachers of computer science joined the project as mentors.
“We are proud that we have managed to build a pan-Ukrainian network of educational hubs that have become a real center of modern knowledge in the regions in slightly more than a year,” commented Ilia Onyschenko, Program Director of BrainBasket.
An international dimension
This past spring, the program expanded to Slovakia and Moldova. The foundation plans to expand its program further on across Central and Eastern Europe in the nearest future.
Earlier this year, the foundation received financial support from Western NIS Enterprise Fund (WNISEF), a $150 million regional private equity fund backed by USAID to invest in Ukraine and Moldova.
BrainBasket also raised more than $5,000 from 40 backers as a result of its Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign.
Source: BrainBasket Foundation
