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Senior high school students in Cebu had the opportunity to use technology to come up with solutions to societal issues. IBM, in partnership with the Department of Information and Communication Technology (DICT), launched the Cebu Innovation Boot Camp, which kicked off last Dec. 9, 2017 at Pajo National High School in Lapu-Lapu City.

This initiative is also in collaboration with the Education Development Center (EDC) and the Metro Cebu Development and Coordinating Board – Research, Programs, and Organizational Development (MCDCB-RPOD), specifically the Focus Area-Based Committee (FABCom) on ICT and Knowledge Management.

The boot camp targeted three public senior high schools in Cebu as recipients for the first wave of the project.

The launch for the two other schools were held last December 15 and 16 at the Ramon Duterte National High School and Mandaue City National Comprehensive High School, respectively.

The Innovation Boot camp will conduct two sessions per school. The first sessions have been completed and tackled topics on technological updates present in the market.

Students also learned of current issues and concerns of Metro Cebu. Edward Kim Yu, Program Officer of the MCDCB-RPOD Project Management Office of the Ramon Aboitiz Foundation Inc., presented to the participants the current situation of Metro Cebu vis-à- vis the plans stipulated in Mega Cebu.

On the same day, IBM presented Bluemix, a cloud-technology platform developed by IBM for programming. The students were able to try Bluemix firsthand. They will use the platform during the subsequent sessions.

The second session of the program, which will be implemented between January and February of 2018, will be the project development phase.

The students are expected to develop applications or tech solutions to help address community issues identified. The students will be formed into groups and will be assigned one mentor from IBM who will monitor them closely, providing guidance during the creation of their prototypes and solution pitching.

By the end of the program, the most outstanding prototype applications will be recognized. With this, IBM hopes to include five schools per division for the second iteration of the boot camp.

This project aims to gear the students towards being market-ready for employment and to be prepared to address different socio-economic challenges.

“I have high hopes in seeing students develop useful applications that would address socio-economic issues, through, of course, the help of this Innovation Boot camp,” said Charis Fiel, IBM representative and chairperson of the MCDCB FABCom on ICT and Knowledge Management.

This project is part of IBM’s Corporate Social Responsibility program which focuses on strengthening the K-12 education through infusion of new and available technology.