Around two weeks into the summer of 2019, I heard about a not-for-profit organization that aims to educate/empower people in the autism spectrum called the E.A.S.E. foundation. I’m quite passionate about technology and have acquired quite a bit of knowledge in the subject over the last few years, so I was considering sharing some of my knowledge with the students at the E.A.S.E. foundation. I had heard that people with autism excel with programming because they are good with mathematics and have strong logical skills. Therefore, I contacted a co-founder of the E.A.S.E. foundation, Anoja Rajapatirana, and inquired about conducting a series of programming workshops for students at E.A.S.E. during the summer. She loved the idea, and shortlisted 6 students that possessed the required motor skills to interact with a computer and learn some programming. Since I had to work on my extended essay, and was also doing a software engineering internship at the same time, I agreed to come in on Thursday mornings for the rest of the summer and spend two hours working with the students.

I have had quite a lot of experience leading groups and working with others in the last few years from my experiences in the SGA to GeckoNet to COMUN. However, heading to the first session, I was quite nervous this time around because teaching programming to a group of autistic students with virtually no experience in computing all in Sinhala was very different to my prior leadership experiences. However, at the same time I was quite excited to share my knowledge with a group of people who have faced some unique challenges during their lives. Although he doesn’t have much experience with computing/programming, I asked my brother to come help out as well because I felt the students would need some help following along.

We began with lessons focused on a device called the Microbit, which is a board design by the BBC to teach programming to students at schools. For the first 4 lessons, we worked with this device teaching basic programming concepts with basic inputs like pressing a button or shaking the device, and outputs like hearing a melody or seeing text or a number on screen. We decided to teach these concepts using the block based visual code editor instead using a text based programming language in order to keep things simple. The response was amazing, the students quickly picked up key programming concepts like variables, conditional statements, and loops. Some of the students had been bringing in their own phones and asking about building apps, so during the last two lessons I decided to take the concepts from the previous lessons to the next level and teach some basic Android app development using Java. The app has a button for each student; when a button is pressed a picture of that student is displayed. Some of them wanted to download the app on their own phones, so I have published it on the app store.

Overall, teaching tech at the E.A.S.E. foundation was a great experience. Not only did I vastly improve my leadership, and communication skills over the course of this experience, I also gained a new understanding of the unique problems people face and an appreciation for their resilience. I also feel that I contributed some real value to the students at E.A.S.E.; all the students enjoyed the sessions, and showed quite a lot of interest in the subject. In fact, some students wanted us to teach them how to achieve a certain task like edit a photo/video or listen to an audiobook on their own computers. Although the students at E.A.S.E. were keen that we continue the workshops, I knew I would not be able to do it by myself now that I’m in my senior year. However, given the fact that GeckoNetwork, a service group focused on serving the OSC community, is focused on technology and has many talented and passionate members, in my final year of service leadership I hope to perhaps get GeckoNet to work on and run a monthly or quarterly workshop for the students at the E.A.S.E. foundation.