When Amara Uwase first walked into a Dreamize Africa session, she thought coding was something only adults in offices did. She was twelve years old, curious about everything, and had never touched a line of code in her life. Two years later, she is the reason three schools in Kigali no longer use paper registers to track student attendance.
The Problem he Noticed First
It started with a simple observation. Amara noticed that her school's attendance records were kept in a notebook that often went missing. Teachers spent the first ten minutes of every class calling names. When a student was absent for several days, nobody knew until it was too late. "I thought there must be a better way," she says. "I just didn't know yet that I could be the one to build it."
From Idea to Prototype in Six Months
At Dreamize Africa, students in the Dreamer stage are encouraged to identify problems before they ever open a code editor. Amara spent her first three months interviewing teachers, students, and parents. She sketched wireframes on paper. She asked questions like: Who needs this information? When do they need it? What happens when they don't have it?