We recently decided to hire an intern at Nyaruka. We thought it might be a nice way to give back to the community, to help a student along for a few months, give them a taste of working at a software company. The internship periods were starting soon, so we quickly put together an application form and started advertising for applicants.
The response was excellent. In less than a week, we got over 50 applicants from various universities. Our application was mostly focused on coding questions, very simple things like writing a function to return whether a number is odd or even and simple string manipulations. We are strong believers that coding ability comes first, far before degrees or certificates, so our focus was there.
The applications we got back were varied. Some obviously cheated on their answers, clearly copy/pasting from somewhere on the internet despite our warnings not to use external references. Others gave it their best shot, honestly trying but getting few answers correct. But about eight applicants looked promising, and from those we picked the four which we thought did the best and asked them to come in for a follow up interview.
And here we learned just how badly the Rwandan universities are failing them.
Our interview question for the applicants was a simple one: given a string such as "AABAB", return the string with all consecutive duplicate letters removed, ergo: "ABAB". This is the type of problem one might be given as a first assignment in Computer Science, something that uses only the most basic fundamentals and constructs. But our applicants struggled with it, far more than is reasonable.
Now keep in mind that although this is an internship, all these students were three, four, or even five years into their Computer Science programs. By now they should have a reasonable grasp of programming, debugging etc.. If asked they will tell you their curriculum includes the same titles that any Western CS program might have, Operating Systems, Algorithms etc.. but despite their impressive names, it is clear the universities aren't teaching their students much at all.
This angers me.
It makes me mad at the professors teaching courses they aren't qualified to teach and mad at the universities charging students in both time and money and yet not fulfilling their promise.
The problem stems to their methods in teaching Computer Science. Universities here are still teaching their students using pen and paper, teaching from books instead of computer screens, teaching by lecturing instead of by doing. That simply does not work for this field, you cannot learn how to program by reading a book.
Computer Science isn't unique in this respect, but sometimes this is hard for people who aren't coders to understand, so an analogy might help.
Imagine you take a course to learn how to swim. Not just a short course, but a dedicated university program on swimming. Over the course of years, you attend classes where you learn the names and characteristics of various bodies of water you can swim in. You listen to lectures about buoyancy, take exams on rip tides, diagram the various swimming strokes. Your professors, while unable to swim themselves, assure you that they have also completed this certification and have read many books on the subject. So after years of study, years of applying yourself according to the plans of the university and hours upon hours in the classroom, you graduate with your certificate.
To celebrate, you go to the beach, where you quickly drown. Because, in truth, despite your years of studying, you have no idea how to swim. You've never been in the water.
This is the state of Computer Science in Rwanda (and really the region in general). Despite impressive graduation numbers, despite the glowing press, despite the undisputed progress, there is a shocking failure to actually teach any of the required skills to be a programmer.
This must stop. This must change if Rwanda is at all serious about trying to build an IT sector.
The universities must take a hard look at their professors and their curriculums and redesign them to be more effective. There isn't a huge pool of qualified professors to draw upon, but that doesn't make it hopeless. Both MIT and Stanford, provide many of their class materials online. Not only the lecture notes and assignment, but videos of the lectures themselves. Why not build courses around these? I would guess that small groups of students assigned to work through these courses together would learn far more than they are now.
To give you an idea, this single MIT course: Introduction to Computer Science and Programming, would provide an understanding of CS fundamentals that far exceeds what is taught in the four year programs at the Rwandan universities. A single course! Why can't KIST professors help students through such a course, playing the video lectures, working through the assignments with the students? Why isn't this a model that is adopted?
My advice to anybody in Rwanda who wants to learn Computer Science is this: Don't attend University.
Instead, invest the money in a laptop and a modem. Download and start working your way through the MIT course, find friends to do it with, help each other along. Do the assignments, write the code. It will be hard at times, you will struggle, but it is the only way to learn. When you do complete that course, which should take less than a year, you will have skills that far exceed any of your colleagues who attended University. And with those skills you'll be able to find work doing real programming. As a matter of fact, come to us and show us you did the work, and we'll help you along, certificate or not.
To the Rwandan Government, I plead with you to get serious and start talking to people already here on how you can do better. Some programs already exist which are successfully training students, PIH's Medical Informatics Course being the prime example. But their scale is far too small, their focus too specific. Start finding ways of starting similar programs or scaling the successful ones up. Look at things like Nairobi's iHub as inspiration on how to build the space and community which can help foster an IT community. What if Kigali had an iHub where students could come and work through the MIT course together? Imagine the possibilities if you encouraged a community of students and professionals alike to collaborate in learning?
None of this is expensive, none of this is hard, but the current institutions are failing their students, and in turn, their country in accomplishing Rwanda's goal of building an IT sector. The first step is admitting that what is being done is not working, that the current graduates are not qualified, that the education system is failing them.
Once we can admit that, then we can all work together to do a better job.
We're here because we believe in that dream and because we want to help, so are many others. Let's work together to make it happen.