For the past 3 years, the one sob story that we’ve all had in common as a team was how difficult and irrelevant some of the coding classes we took back in college were.

Amiri, our Chief Technology Officer once remarked that in one programming class 5 years ago, he just stared at the lecturer wondering where on earth he would ever use ‘if’ statements! Fast forward to today, he uses loads of ‘if’ statements as he writes code and has come to appreciate them.

But why do so many of us find programming difficult or boring yet we use technology in almost every aspect of our lives? Every year, hundreds of students graduate with computer science or engineering degrees in Rwanda but we do not see computer applications born in similar proportions.

In the next ten years, there will be about 1.4 million jobs in computer science with an estimated shortage of about 1 million qualified people to fill them. So why aren’t more of us learning how to write computer programs? Programming is simply telling a computer what you want it to do! Simple, right? But to so many, anybody who can write code is a superhero, invincible and able to decode mysteries. 

Well Hack Out Loud is here to show you just how simple programming can be. Team HeHe will be spending an entire day with about 25 selected high school students who will be learning how to solve real world problems by writing computer programs to solve them.

Using simple and intuitive platforms and methods, the students will at the end of the day have built computer applications and uploaded them to the internet where anyone in the world can use them! And all the while having fun at it!

Our vision for Hack Out Loud, born out of our own frustrations in learning how to write code, is to shape the youth to be confident enough to be at the forefront of the next generation of technologies to be developed by Rwandans!