KELOWNA – Premier Christy Clark was in Kelowna today to hand out money to five post-secondary schools, including Okanagan College. With the $250 thousand, $50 thousand for each institution, the schools are supposed to provide coding instruction. The money is meant to support the province’s tech industry by helping to train workers for jobs in the sector.
“The money is going to mean that we are able to create coding programs that are specifically relevant to the industries that need them,” says Clark. “One of the things that we know about tech is that it changes all the time and that means we need to do what we call the co-creation of curriculum. It means we need to work together to figure out what the course material is going to be so that young people when they graduate are absolutely ready to go straight into the market.”
Okanagan College’s president, Jim Hamilton, says the industry is looking for people with specific skills including coding and the money will help the college to address the industry’s needs by either creating new programs or modifying existing programs.
Clark says she expects this pilot program will eventually be rolled out across the province. The other schools getting funding are BCIT, Simon Fraser University, the University of British Columbia and the University of Victoria.
Clark made the announcement at Hyper Hippo Games which, as its name suggests, creates games including one called AdVenture Capitalist. When a reporter asked if she’d ever played, Clark took aim at the opposition.
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