Passionate about grooming Sri Lanka’s next generation with capabilities to take the island into a new era of knowledge-based innovation and growth, Sri Lanka Association for Software and Services Companies (SLASSCOM) has always dedicated itself to the cause of technology education for children. As an initiative of the association’s Capacity Forum, Teck Kids, a tech-ed initiative to teach kids how to code, was launched over two years ago, to provide students (6 to 16 years), with a solid foundation for computer programming while developing computational thinking skills, creativity, and innovation.

TechKids since its inception, which has many leading SLASSCOM member companies that have come on board as code club hosts and facilitated awareness-building coding sessions with their inhouse, well-trained volunteers, has become one of the most influential children’s educational programmes that have instilled IT knowledge and developed a thirst for technology education among school kids.

Continuing the quest of influencing the next generation of Sri Lankans to be digitally savvy citizens in every sphere of activities they embark on, SLASSCOM recently launched a TechKids code club with Datavail Sri Lanka that provides deep specialization in database management, analytics operations, and application solutions.

The collaboration between Techkids and Datavail that further expands the scope to yet another prospective cluster of young Sri Lankans to be digitally tech-savvy citizens was initiated by Malinda Sirisena, Director, General Country Manager – Sri Lanka, and Chamal Fernando, Manager – Network Services/ IT from Datavail.

As a key part of this program, Aravindi Amarasinghe and Dinusha Gammanpila both seasoned software engineers working at Datavail joined the TechKids Facilitator accreditation programme and started conducting online coding sessions for a group of kids every Monday from May 2022 to complete 10 weekly sessions by July to get the participating kids to complete TechKids stage 1 curriculum. SLASSCOM is also playing an engaging role, by being involved in assessing the quality of the delivery and coverage of the content of each of the sessions.

The first session to be completed in this series introduced the platform Scratch through the coding project Rock Band, which had over 20 Kids coming on board the program.

Backed by the success of initiatives such as that of the code club launched in partnership with Datavail, along with many other similar milestones reached since its inception, SLASSCOM this year will be seeking more active participation from the IT/BPM companies in terms of both volunteering support, as well as in launching further TechKids code clubs across the country to nurture and give birth to a new generation of creative and innovative individuals.