When Mehdi Kettani noticed his children spending significant time immersed in the digital world, he set himself the challenge of using his 17 years’ experience working in the IT world to find beneficial content for them to consume. This grew into the idea of teaching his own and other children in Morocco to code, and La Digitale Academie was born.
La Digitale Academie offers workshops for children from the age of eight years old, to discover computer programming through the creation of their own video games or interactive stories. It also offers a training program to equip teachers to introduce their students to computer science, as well as individual or group sessions for parents.
“The goal of La Digitale Academie is to help children use technology and understand it in their everyday lives,” says Kettani, who is now president of the NGO. “Tech has become too complex for non-tech people, so we host workshops that teach our students how to help others, using technology.”
Infrastructure to develop knowledge and code
Despite its mission to develop its students’ knowledge of and passion for science and technology and to teach them how to become responsible digital citizens, La Digitale Academie lacked its own IT infrastructure.
“We mainly used phone and email, which meant we wasted a lot of time and it was tedious sharing information. Sometimes, the educators didn’t have the right schedule or the latest documents, just before a workshop,” says Kettani. “Working with Microsoft has changed that, as through its Philanthropies programme, we have gained access to a high level of technology very quickly.
Through its partnership with Microsoft, La Digitale Academie now provides its educators with Office 365 accounts, which makes sharing documents and calendars, as well as collaborating and communicating, much easier. In particular, the NGO makes use of Outlook, Skype for Business, Sharepoint, Teams, and Tasks, which Kettani mentions is useful for project monitoring.
“The two most important things about Microsoft’s products are that they are easy to use and reliable. The biggest benefit has been the ease of access to information,” says Kettani. “Now all the trainers have access to the training schedules and to documents relating to the training. They no longer need to look for an SMS or email to find information, which may already be outdated. In this way, O365 has entirely met our needs, as we are able to collaborate with incredible ease. And you can understand how to use the technology almost immediately – there’s barely any need for training as everything is very intuitive.”
Kettani also highlights La Digitale Academie’s use of DNS Zone and several Azure virtual machines to host its website and provide its students with testing platforms so they can create a proof of concept, based on their coding. In addition, because the majority of its work can now be done online, educators and other staff members no longer need to travel as much, and can rather focus on their projects.
Creativity, logic and a leg-up in the 21st century
Thanks to La Digitale Academie, along with Microsoft’s assistance, children in Morocco are beginning to understand what technology can be used for, and are realising what they are capable of. In La Digitale Academie’s first year, the NGO trained 10 teachers, 200 children and provided 100 hours of activities. Longer term, exposure to technology also has the potential to help them develop creativity, logic and mathematical reasoning, and encourage them to pursue careers in the world of science and technology.
“As technology continues to be present in everyday life, they will possess an undeniable asset,” says Kettani. “We aim to continue collaborating with Microsoft to empower not only students within our NGO, but also other non-profit organisations through technology.”
