Nurturing Future Software Experts: Junior Software Academy Begins

Do you remember your primary school days? After school, you might have played football, made sand castles with your friends, drawn pictures on your sketchbook or dived into the world of fantasy in fairytales.

Samsung is planning a unique project to make after school activities a bit more colorful and dynamic. And that is to help children learn basic software technologies to become fresh sprouts of the software industry.

We support children’s dream of becoming the best software engineers

The project is called the Junior Software Academy, and we're planning to give software lessons to 10,000 students of ages between 11 and 17 every year. The lessons will be held mainly after school or during the weekends starting this year.

You'll remember the recent article on our blog introducing Samsung’s project to help recruits with liberal arts majors become software experts. This was a program carried out internally. The Junior Software Academy is a program to nurture software talents beyond the boundaries of our companies.

The main purpose of this program is to help children become familiar with the basic concepts of software, giving them a chance to envision their future as software engineers. With this program, software classes will be offered to students at 500 elementary and junior schools throughout Korea.

Love robots? You can join the software camp with other friends!

There will also be various types of fun programs to draw juniors’ attraction. One of them is the Junior Software Academy Camp. A three-day camp was held last week and children were able to develop their ideas into real software programs. As most children love robots, they also had a chance to learn software languages that are used in robot technologies.

“I think I came close to my dream of becoming a doctor who makes humanoid robots that play the piano to the patients!” said Ji-Woo Kang, a student who took part in this camp.

We’re planning to hold more software junior camps so that more children can develop interest in software through fun events.

We also plan to hold software competitions to find the best young software talents and we’re also developing specially tailored teaching materials in software that fit the level of the children and teenagers.

Special teachers will be invited

To make this program more meaningful, we’re inviting special teachers to lead each of the lessons. Mostly, the lecturers will be our employees who have special knowledge and expertise in software programming – mainly software engineers. They will participate in this program and have a chance to share their expertise with the children.

Also, students majoring in software engineering and housewives with software expertise who are currently unemployed can work as part-time teachers for this program. We expect that this will also be a good chance for them to develop their future career.

We believe it is very important to breed future talents to set the solid groundwork for the development of software industry. It’s the reason why we’ll continue to come up with new ideas to help young software talents follow their dreams!