Rise of the digital kids and what that means for parents

With the sharp reduction in the average age of Kenyans during their first contact with computers, and because the technology spread is expected to be fairly uniform, how will children be a few years from now? PHOTO | NATION

What you need to know:

  • With Kenya pulling out all the stops to introduce children to computers right from lower primary, it is worth taking note of the consequences of such an initiative and to learn from history too.
  • According to a Unicef report, for every minute a child is on the Internet, there are about 750,000 paedophiles; someone trying to chat your daughter, someone trying to chat your son”.
  • Another danger lying ahead, he warns, is that the more people understand how computers work, the easier it will be for the ill-minded to hack into electronic systems, which may cause chaos in the IT industry.

Put on your imagination cap for a moment and visualise the news headlines about Kenyan youngsters a decade from now, given the current initiatives to have children learn with computers as they start primary school ...

“15-Year-Old Hacks Government Website, Causes Two-Week Shutdown”...

“Boy Secretly Sells Kidney after Online ‘Friend’ Convinces Him It’s the Only Way to Buy Latest Gadget”...

“Kenyan Students Beat Odds to Create Worldwide-Acclaimed Software”...

“Teenage Girl Commits Suicide Following Encounter with Cyberbully”...

“Survey Blames Technology for Increase in Obese Kenyan Kids”.

You think your imagination has been stretched to the limits? Well, real incidents suggested by some of those headlines have been witnessed in the developed world.

A 13-year-old girl in Los Angeles committed suicide in 2007 after her online interaction with a cyberbully ended abruptly with an insult from the “man” she had been chatting with.

A great future beckons. They, however, warned parents to keep a watchful eye over their children to check against raising a generation of tech-savvy monsters. PHOTO | FILE

The Telegraph reported that her parents would later discover that she had actually been chatting with a fictional man created by a woman neighbour whose daughter had been friends with the 13-year-old until they fell out.

And in 2012, a 17-year-old Chinese boy secretly sold a kidney to buy an iPad. Chinese news agency Xhinua reported that by the time his mother discovered it, he had already bought the gadget and he was suffering from renal deficiency.

In Miami, United States, a 15-year-old boy was arrested in 2000 for hacking into the systems of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) and causing a 21-day shutdown.

Back in Kenya, the Twitter accounts of Deputy President William Ruto and that of the Kenya Defence Forces were hacked in 2014, with investigators saying the culprit was a teenager.

Such occurrences may be commonplace in the years to come, if the passion with which Standard One pupils and many parents have embraced government-issued gadgets in the schools is anything to go by.

For instance, in Ndurarua Primary School in Nairobi’s Kawangware, one of the schools that received tablets for Standard One pupils in May to pilot the government’s digital literacy programme, the enrolment has been on the rise since.

“Initially, we had 155 children in Class One but, as we’re speaking now, we’re heading to 180. That’s a good show,” Ms Catherine Waithera, a teacher at the institution, told Lifestyle on Thursday.

A non-governmental organisation joined efforts with the government at Ndurarua to teach children how to code software.

One of its beneficiaries is 11-year-old Kevin Mukirai, a Standard Five pupil who — with just a few months of training by the NGO — has created an application for children to test their addition skills.

This writer could only pick out random words like “variables”, “scores” and “sets” as Mukirai explained the jargon of how he instructs a computer to check if a child has typed the right answer and how the computer provides the correct sum if a wrong answer has been put in.

So far, Kenyan schoolgirls have created breakthrough technologies like an app to phase out queues while purchasing bus tickets, an app to ease organ donation among others.

If more children grow up with Mukirai’s knowledge, one can only imagine the kinds of software innovations that will come out of Kenya.

Moreover, Kenyan parents are getting increasingly wowed by their children’s ability to master with ease the working of the latest electronic gadgets, and it is nowadays hard for youngsters to imagine that their parents touched a computer very late in their lives — a handful of them in secondary school, others in tertiary institutions, others in their workplaces.

The latest government economic survey says it is getting easier for Kenyans to access the internet, pointing to tricky times ahead for youngsters who often take their naivety online.

“Internet subscriptions increased significantly from 16.4 million in 2014 to 23.9 million in 2015,” the report says.

That number is bound to increase alongside the number of minors who can comfortably use a computer, given the many initiatives introducing children to electronics.

Besides the government, other institutions have been introducing computers to schools and libraries, albeit on a smaller scale.

Among them is the Open Space Literacy programme being championed by a global organisation. SOS Children’s Villages, an NGO that houses vulnerable children, and Plan International are involved in the initiative.

INTERNET ACCESS

Another danger lying ahead, he warns, is that the more people understand how computers work, the easier it will be for the ill-minded to hack into electronic systems, which may cause chaos in the IT industry. PHOTO | FILE

The programme is now in 30 schools in Nairobi and mainly targets learners in lower primary. It involves providing learners with laptops pre-installed with government-approved curricula to aid their learning.

“For now, we have 26,000 children who are benefiting through this project directly,” says Mr Daniel Oloo, the National ICT for Development Co-ordinator at SOS Children’s Villages Kenya.

Equally, the eLimu initiative has previously partnered with the Kenya National Library Services to teach children how to use computers when they visit libraries during weekends.

Another initiative is spearheaded by BRCK Education, which involves giving learners tablet computers dubbed Kio Kit that have internet access.

By November last year, five primary schools and libraries were using the Kio Kit, according to the AFP news agency.  

On the government side, the ICT Authority says the digital literacy programme will see 1.2 million tablet computers delivered to all the 23,951 schools by December.

With the sharp reduction in the average age of Kenyans during their first contact with computers, and because the technology spread is expected to be fairly uniform, how will children be a few years from now?

Technology experts, Kenyans and educators told Lifestyle that a great future beckons. They, however, warned parents to keep a watchful eye over their children to check against raising a generation of tech-savvy monsters.

Mr Desmond Rao, a trained programmer from the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, has been teaching basic software making skills to upper primary children at Ndurarua Primary School for the last four months, and he is the one who trained Mukirai.

Mr Rao, who works with Kids on the Globe, foresees more productivity at the workplace.

“You don’t think about writing; you just write out of the top of your mind. If that becomes your computing skill, that you want to do something and you just start doing, it brings in a lot of productivity,” he says.

“Maybe I’m employed as a programmer but if someone called me to fix their mouse and to fix their keyboard and to fix funny things, it’s a waste of company time. So, imagine you have kids who are rising up and their level of knowledge is so high.”

Mr Rao also sees Kenya being a go-to place when searching for innovative minds.

“The way we hear that India is for people who want to outsource for programmers, for developers, this will be the next hub. People would want to set up in Kenya because you know the kind of workforce you’re working with, naturally the system has just brought them to such a high level of aptitude.

Mr Dancan Kibui, an assistant lecturer in the Computing and IT Department at Kenyatta University, says there will be no paperwork in the days to come.

In Mr Kibui’s observation, it will be easier to teach advanced technological concepts like those taught in university if all students join with basic computer skills.

“I lecture first years and second years and the things that I’m trying to introduce to them, some of them tell me that they have never even heard of such,” he says.

“Sometimes it becomes very hectic because you have to go steps back and try and tell someone that ‘this is a mouse and a mouse is like an input device’ and all. It becomes a little harder,” he adds, with a chuckle.

Mr Oloo, the SOS Children’s co-ordinator, also foresees a paperless economy and is envisioning the birth of another breakthrough innovation from Kenya, just like M-Pesa.

“All our children are going to move from paper and they are supposed to have a PIN number — all those kind of passwords — at a young age. So, you can imagine when these guys grow up, how will they be? They’ll be able to compete with the outside world,” he says.

Ms Waithera, the teacher at Ndurarua who has been co-ordinating the laptop project in her school, says she already feels challenged by the Standard One class.

“They’ve started giving me the challenge. So, I’m imagining by the time they’re in Class Eight, they will be fully prepared to face high school life and to face the world,” she says.

FISH IN WATER

One of the children that Ms Waithera supervises, who was at Education Ministry stand during the Nairobi International Trade Fair that ends today, is Liz Njoki.

Njoki demonstrated to Lifestyle her mastery in controlling her tablet with the dexterity of a computer genius, closing windows and switching to new subjects as if she had been using the machine all her life.

“Like now, we are in a mathematics class, being shown how to read time. We can also go to another subject. The teacher can also help us do that,” she explained.

The opportunity created by the increased access to technology, in some cases to children who have never had a chance to interact with a computer before, can be compared to the opportunity offered to computer programming legend Bill Joy, credited for revamping Unix, Java among other systems in the 1970s, in a way that was so elaborate it is being used to date.

In his book Outliers: The Story of Success, author Malcolm Gladwell argues that a great deal of practice is required to make someone perfect in a certain field. Gladwell writes that the time Bill Joy spent while programming as a student at the University of Michigan was the reason he became good at programming.

If the current Class One learners carry on with the digital learning to Class Eight, they shall have spent 3,744 hours with the gadgets, which will be on the way to reaching the 10,000-hour duration that some theorists believe a person should spend before mastering a certain task.

But despite the future looking bright, many pitfalls lie in the way because with the constant increase in internet penetration, minors are likely to either fall into the hands of criminal minds or become criminals themselves.

“We have a lot of issues that are going on where paedophiles are using the internet to lure children into performing these indecent acts,” says Mr Oloo of SOS Children’s Villages.

He adds: “Technology has what I call digital tattoos where, if you have done something wrong, you’ve posted something using any kind of technology, it does not disappear.”

Ms Waithera, the Ndurarua teacher, said: “We can just caution the parents to control the machines, because these children have learnt a lot. So, when they go home and they find that their parents have got these phones or there are also computers and laptops, they can use them and go to areas that they are not supposed to be. Let parents control or give limits as to where the children can use the laptops.”

Award-winning software creator Kimutai Kipng’etich, who was barely out of his teens when he co-created the Bunifu Antivirus in 2011, says there is also a risk of minors becoming anti-social and obese if they are let to be hooked to technology. “It may also interfere with natural development of children because it reduces physical activity,” he says.

Another danger lying ahead, he warns, is that the more people understand how computers work, the easier it will be for the ill-minded to hack into electronic systems, which may cause chaos in the IT industry.

Mr Kipng’etich, however, differs with a section of Kenyans who opine that children should not be introduced to technology too early in their lives, saying it only helps learning.

Among those opposed to early exposure of children to electronic gadgets is Dr Cyrus Abanti, the Dean of the School of Computing and Informatics at Mount Kenya University. Dr Abanti told Lifestyle that the radiation emitted from some of the gadgets can be harmful to the minors’ health. He was, however, positive on the general outcome of the trend of young people being trained with technology. “What we are experiencing is sort of a revolution,” he said.

Ms Lillian Kariuki, the founder of Watoto Watch Network, a Nairobi-based organisation, has come face-to-face with the impact of exposing minors to technology and cautions parents to keep a watchful eye on their children lest they fall victim to molesting.

Ms Lillian Kariuki, the founder of Watoto Watch Network, a Nairobi-based organisation, has interacted with more than 13,000 children in various schools, aged between five and 17, to discuss matters related to online safety.

She recalls one session at a boy’s secondary school where she found out that the act of exchanging nude images — commonly called “sexting” — seemed not to shock most of them.

Given the threat posed by the enlarging technological space, lawmakers are mulling a number of laws to address online misbehaviour. PHOTO | FILE

She said that in one session, learners spent over 30 minutes questioning what was wrong with sending nude images “especially if the girl is willing”.

“Over and over, they were asking about it because they’re doing it,” she said.

“According to a Unicef report, for every minute a child is on the Internet, there are 750,000 paedophiles; someone trying to chat your daughter, someone trying to chat your son.”

Given the threat posed by the enlarging technological space, lawmakers are mulling a number of laws to address online misbehaviour.

They include the Cyber Security and Protection Bill 2016 currently in the Senate that provides punishment for offences like hacking, cyber terrorism, cyber-bullying and child exploitation.

On the hacking section, the Bill says a person who alters the way a computer system works is liable on conviction to imprisonment for a term not exceeding three years or to a fine not exceeding two hundred thousand shillings or both.”

On the child exploitation, the Bill sponsored by Nyeri Senator Mutahi Kagwe — who chairs the Senate IT committee — proposes a stiff penalty for anyone who uses a computer to lure a child into sex.

“A person who, through any computer system, or network, proposes, grooms or solicits to meet a child for the purpose of engaging in sexual activities … shall be liable upon conviction to a term of imprisonment not exceeding 25 years or to a fine not exceeding Sh250,000 or both,” it says.