Perhaps he is not the only one or the first to teach programming to children in the Arab world. There are several start-ups and initiatives operating in a number of Arab countries, but each of them operates within the country to which he belongs.
As for the Egyptian young man, Mohamed Gawish, who is one of the talented Arab youth in programming and artificial intelligence, he chose to use the great experience he gained in creating the “iSchool” digital platform to teach Egyptian and Arab youth this specialty remotely, beyond national borders.
This project was met with great acceptance and success, and was behind it being crowned last June with the Founder of the Year award at the Global Startup Awards 2021.
About this platform, the award, his career and the future of programming sciences and artificial intelligence in the Arab world, Muhammad Jawish tells us.
You recently received the Founder of the Year award for global startups in South Africa for your entrepreneurial project iSchool, when and how did that happen?
I won the Founder of the Year award for North Africa at the Global Startup Awards in South Africa last June, and received the award during a large ceremony at the International Exhibition Center in Cape Town, in the presence of more than 44,000 people from 45 countries around the world.
The Founder of the Year award aims to honor a startup founder who demonstrates strong leadership skills, achieves exceptional business results, inspires the team, and serves as a role model for the next generation of startup founders.
My winning of the award was in exchange for establishing iSchool, the largest technical education platform in the Middle East and North Africa region specialized in teaching programming and artificial intelligence to students from 16 to 18 years old.
Tell us about your journey, about iSchool, and when was it founded?
And what are its objectives?
And your accomplishments?
I am the co-founder and business development manager at iSchool in Egypt since July 2018, and I have been the International Program Coordinator at Fujisoft Incorporated since September 2018.
She also worked as an education consultant at Makeblock between 2019 and 2020, and was Director of Research and Development at Ampere Robotics between 2015 and 2016.
I obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Communications Engineering from Cairo University in 2018, and a Business Administration degree from Indiana University in the United States in 2017.
I-School specialized in teaching students programming sciences and artificial intelligence from a distance, and it spread widely, and many began to deal with us, and we have 9,000 graduates, and we have students from Egypt, the Arab region, America, Canada and Germany.
Graduates now work freely in technology fields and earn a monthly income of more than $600, as well as access to training opportunities in technology companies, as well as scholarships in the United States and Japan.
What is the secret of your success?
Are there reasons behind your superiority?
At the university, I was very interested in participating in robotics and programming competitions in Egypt, Japan, China and Malaysia, and I was keen to benefit others, share knowledge with others and train those who need it, and this in itself is among the reasons for success.
One year before my graduation, specifically in 2017, I received a scholarship to travel and study entrepreneurship and project management at Indiana University in the United States of America.
After studying entrepreneurship, I got a great opportunity to continue my studies in Japan because I hold the certificate of the first Arab and African sumo robot arbitrator from Fujisoft.
These scientific trips between Japan and America in particular allowed me to develop my skills, and I discovered that technology education in the world is developing at a rapid pace, but in Egypt and many Arab countries there was no tendency to upgrade this field, so I decided to go through this new experience in order to qualify a new generation of Students are pioneers in technology, and thankfully the results speak for themselves.
Why do you think the global digital platforms for teaching robotics and programming are still immature?
Most of the platforms do not focus on the age group from 6 to 18 years of age in an accurate scientific manner, and are specifically directed to them as curricula, tools and programming languages.
What distinguishes us at iSchool is that we focus on children only, and we train from 6 to 18 years old, teach them technology and programming, and focus on the 10 most in-demand jobs, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, all of which are areas in which we teach children and gain them basic skills.
We are also in line with the visions of many countries, such as Egypt Vision 2030;
Egypt, for example, wants to reach one million programmers, and in order to reach that in 2030, we must teach children to code from now in order to prepare them to be programmers in 2030.
We are working to be a nucleus to accomplish this challenge, and thank God we have children who have traveled to America and Japan and received grants, and there are students who have become working independently and earning great income, and we are trying to make the student an entrepreneur in the technological field since childhood.
Mohamed Gawish won the "Founder of the Year" award for the year 2021 for founding the startup "iSchool" (communication sites)
Why aren't programming sciences, artificial intelligence and robotics taught in public educational institutions in the Arab world, with the exception of some private schools?
Teaching programming, artificial intelligence and robotics to students from 6 to 18 years old requires a great effort from developing scientific content, to equipping laboratories, and training trainers and teachers, and this also requires costs that public schools cannot afford.
For this reason, parents resort to special platforms that provide opportunities at an affordable price, and some private schools in Egypt provide them through our company to keep pace with technological development, and we seek to cooperate with ministries in the Arab region to generalize them in public schools.
What is the importance of specializing in robotics, programming and artificial intelligence in raising children and preparing them for the future?
In 2018, the World Economic Forum published a report entitled “The Jobs Landscape in 2022”, in which it identified the ten jobs that will be in demand globally for more than 133 million jobs, all of which are related to programming sciences, artificial intelligence, robotics and other similar disciplines such as e-marketing and big data processing.
This report was among one of the motivations for launching the iSchool platform to teach programming and artificial intelligence to students from 6 to 18 years of age, and to provide it in Arabic and English remotely for more than 100 million students in the Middle East and North Africa, because it guarantees them the future and develops their skills in Solve problems to make them stand out in the labor market, regardless of specialization.
A lot of industry professionals talk about India's experience as a leading country, how do you explain that?
India is a leading country in the field, and has been developing technology approaches significantly for more than 15 years, to the extent that it now has the largest number of CEOs in the world for giant tech companies.
India also has the most number of unicorn companies, that is, billions of companies in the field of technological education, so India is currently an example in creating new generations of technology pioneers, exporting technical services to the world, and providing foreign currency at competitive prices.
The "iSchool" platform targets children from 6 to 18 years old (communication sites)
Do you have projects in Egypt with government agencies to generalize this specialization in educational institutions?
We are working to establish cooperation with the Ministry of Technical Education and the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology to launch initiatives to teach programming and artificial intelligence to students from 6 to 18 years old to achieve Egypt's Vision 2030 to reach one million programmers in the Egyptian market.