Young people from across the country gained hands-on skills in artificial intelligence (AI), coding, and robotics, while also learning new technologies to develop innovative solutions to community challenges.
This training forms part of the build-up activities to the International Youth Day celebrations to be held tomorrow at Keetmanshoop.
The founder, Sebulon Dawid, who specialises in IT solutions, facilitated the three-day Artificial Intelligence Coding bootcamp and youth hackathon.
“AI is disrupting the whole industries, whether it's mining or agriculture, education, all that and it's a space that is growing very, very fast and it requires young people to get on board while at this stage where everybody is actually trying to understand it and major companies are also putting out a lot of opportunities as well that young Namibians need to also kind of get into as well to create employment opportunities for themselves.”
The trainees described the bootcamp as an eye-opener.
“There are many job opportunities here in Keetmanshoop that were discovered that you can use AI to solve our local community problems, and we also learned how to build robots, how to structure them and how to code, to program them to do the specific role they are given with,” explained Wenzel Skeyer.
“I learned more about the data. I didn't know there was something called Data LLM so that is also what I came to learn about AI,” stressed Kovii Kapi.
"The one thing I learned from AI that I didn't know is the back and side of things, the different graphic process units that are used to run on how it generate it response, where all this data is kept, which is the data centers, where all the information is kept,” noted Devine Jansen.
“I think we should focus more on AI literacy; schools should bring more in AI literacy, for jobs to make easier and for people not to be afraid of AI because AI is not here to take your jobs, AI is here to help you and make your life easy,” added Lindy Frederick.
The participants will showcase their products and solutions they have developed during the bootcamp at the International Youth Day Celebrations tomorrow.