NGO TASKS YOUTH TO DEVELOP CREATIVE SKILLS

Students and  organisers in a group photograph at the event.

By Lucy Ekpenyong

In a bid to create value and enhance performance in the lives of young people, in order to bring them up to speed with emerging technologies, the Vision 2020 initiative a non governmental organization, recently organised a Jigsaw Competition for schools in Lagos state. The puzzle programme which is the first in the series is aimed at sensitising,educating and developing,our future leaders to use their initiative to solve problems and meet up with their foreign counterparts. The Consultant and initiator of the programme Dr. Ibilola Amao,in an exclusive interview, said the major focus is to inform the youths about current realities globally, train and shape them to think out of the box, to perform optimally in this ICT driven world. For her, Basic problem solving techniques are strategy for finishing huge tasks,they are not figured out. “There is always a winning strategy, you need to collaborate and coordinate your resources. She further added that beyond education the ability to solve problems,reason critically, creatively and logically,develop new mind set as a team can make them compete favourably in this age”. According to lfunaya Dibiaezue, the programme Coordinator, the Idea to test the problem solving skills of the students,was as a result of their performance during the summer classes, the NGO organise yearly, entries were called for and twenty eight (28) schools both the private and public school was selected from the lot. “The schools were given an identical puzzle to solve in three(3) hours, very few could solve the puzzle,but eight schools emerged after tasking their ability to work as a team,four, Holy Child,ldeal girls, Mainland Senior High school,Herbert Macaulay Senior girls High school,got to the final round. Continuing she emphasised that “the programme is for the youths to acquire knowledge and skill set of their counterparts in developed world and this is necessary otherwise they will be enslaved, sometimes in life one needs to learn quickly to compete”. At the end of almost six (6),hours to fix 2,000 pieces of the puzzle, Holy Child came first with 1,183, ldeal girls came second with 790, while Mainland Senior High school came third with 714. There is need to work on the problem solving skills of our youths, lfunaya Dibiaezue emphasised.