COL and the Women’s Development Center (WDC), based in Kandy, Sri Lanka, organised a five-day workshop for trainers, to train marginalised and underprivileged girls on mobile application development. This workshop is the first phase of a national project to prepare 5,000 girls to start their own mobile application development business or use ICTs to enter higher education and promote lifelong learning.

During the workshop held from August 27-31, 2018 at the ACBT Kandy campus, 25 girls between the ages of 17 and 27 representing different ethnic groups, learned Android mobile application development using the “MIT App Inventor” platform. The workshop was conducted in both Sinhala and English with the aid of the “Educational App Development Toolkit for Teachers and Learners” published by COL. The toolkit has been translated into the Sinhala language to help the participants learn better.

The facilitator of the workshop and author of the Educational App Development Toolkit for Teachers and Learners – Dr Ishan Abeywardena, COL Adviser on Open Educational Resources said “Traditionally, Android app development is a highly specialised field reserved only for software engineers and programmers. However, the concept of ‘visual programming’ has democratised this space and allows non-programmers also to build powerful applications using logical building blocks that give them a solid foundation to develop more complex apps in the future.”