Dr. Lameck Amugongo, a former DARA Big Data PhD student, has been advocating for compulsory coding lessons in schools to enhance technology skills among young people. He previously tutored at DARA Big Data workshops and organized the NUST-DARA Data Science School, a week-long event from 25-29 April 2022 at the University of Namibia (UNAM) with nearly 200 applicants. The event hosted 30 participants and 5 tutors, featuring tutorials, a hackathon, and ‘fireside chats,’ fostering strong connections and insights. The hackathon, hosted by IDIA’s ilifu Cloud Computing platform, included projects on NLP/sentiment analysis, image classification, and flood detection. Team Veritas won first place for developing an app that quickly analyzes public sentiment using Twitter data. This independently organized hackathon used resources from the OAD page (visit link). Dr. Amugongo expressed satisfaction with the participants’ progress and hopes to host similar events regularly to continue advancing technological skills in Namibia. For more information, please visit the following webpage.