The NaijaCoder (http://naijacoder.org) team has come up with a syllabus that we hope can touch on different aspects of computer programming and, more importantly, inspire the students to continue learning on their own.

Daily Checkups

The instructors plan to give out daily exercises to the students to make sure that they understood and, sufficiently, digested the material. The emphasis will be on the quality of the syllabus to help the students (given their varied backgrounds) and not the quantity. The main reference textbook, for now, will be “Introduction to Algorithms” by Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest, and Clifford Stein. At the end of every day/week, the instructors plan to send out a survey so that feedback can be incorporated into future versions of the syllabus.

Motivational Videos

When I was in high school, I would get bored easily if I didn’t understand why I should learn a concept or tool. So the instructors plan to motivate some programming concepts with some videos by creators (e.g., see this video by Marian Croak sharing her pioneering work on Voice over Internet Protocol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OignKQOJT-U).

Fun

This might be the most important part of the program! We hope they can have fun and that some of them could end up creating a video game in some programming language. In addition, daily group lunches could provide some nice camaraderie.