< Code Girl />

Code Girl All characters and scenarios in this post are entirely fictional Because of the partnership between airtel and facebook, it was possible for a young girl in the village of some state in western Nigeria to begin learning how to code. What I mean by coding is writing some set of instructions for the computer in order to solve specific problems, these lines of code packaged together is called software.

The partnership of facebook and airtel in Africa gave birth to something called Free basics. Free basics is a service that allows people to access information on the internet for free (without paying for data subscription).

The little girl began to learn great stuff like the legendary "hello world", variables, assignments, operators etc. She was having the best time of her life or her mama's mobile phone.

She got to an important aspect of programming called conditions. Conditional statements help in decision making.
 For example, a girl wants to separate her black dresses from the red ones. Lol, a funny thought just crossed my mind. Girls ain't the only ones that wear dresses nowadays, some boys also do and they call themselves cross-dressers. I won't mention names because this is not a gossip post. I am sorry for the diversion.

So, the girl prefers to keep her black dresses in the upper drawer of her closet and the red ones in the drawer below.  Writing a conditional statement for this task will look like this:

The simple flow 

 if (dress.color == black){ // if dress is color black  
  push to upper drawer;  
 } else { // since we are arranging only red and black dresses we can assume that if the dress is not red it's black  
  push to lower drawer;  
 }  

One on faithful day, her mom sent her to the next street to buy palm oil and eggs. She said and I quote

buy one bottle of palm oil, and if they have eggs, buy five

This fascinating young coder gets to her destination to buy what her mama sent her. She confirmed that palm oil was available, she got a bottle and she proceeded to ask for eggs. The seller confirms that she has eggs. You expect her to buy five eggs. But her mama said

buy one bottle of palm oil, and if they have eggs, buy five

She bought a bottle of palm oil and when she confirmed that they had eggs in stock too, she decided to buy four more bottles of palm oil to make it five bottles.

Getting home to her mama, her mama was furious. She wanted to spank her because she wondered how a girl as smart as her daughter couldn't run a simple errand. In protest, the little girl in between her sobs said: "Mama, I can explain.. I did exactly what you asked ". She picked up her school slate, hanged it on the wall and began to explain basic control flow to her mama right in front of their little house.

 buy(OneBottleOfPalmOil); //Buy one bottle of palm oil  
 if ( eggIsAvailable) { //If they have eggs  
      buy(OneBottleOfPalmOil * 5) //Buy Five  
 }  

People passing by stopped paid some attention to the little girl's explanation of conditional statements to her mama.
That was how a 7-year-old girl gave the first coding tutorial to half of her community without ever having access to a computer or the Internet.

Thanks for your time.