Africa Teen Geeks hosts a preview screening of Hidden Figures movie

This afternoon I was privileged to attend a special screening of the movie Hidden Figures, organised by Lindiwe Matlali, founder of NGO Africa Teen Geeks. I tracked her down after reading a City Press article about the work she is doing using the principles of knitting to teach 5 year olds basic programming skills.

Today's screening was for 180 girls from disadvantaged backgrounds and shown simultaneously in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban, sponsored by the film distributor Times Media Films, City Press and Standard Bank.

Hidden Figures is a true story about three African-American women employed by Nasa as "computers" in the race to put an American into space. Human computers were used before digital computers were commonplace, to check the mathematics of the engineers employed in the space programme.

Overcoming extraordinary obstacles and institutionalised racial discrimination, they succeed in a truly remarkable fashion. Lindiwe saw the film as an inspiration for the girls to choose STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects at school and judging by their reactions it hit the mark.

Also attending the screening were Ntombi Khumalo and Mpho Phalatse, both mayoral committee members in the City of Johannesburg and both with STEM doctorates. The three of us, together with CEO of German engineering firm Thyssen Krupp Thabo Molekoa, formed a panel before the screening where Mitchell Hughes, head of information systems at Wits asked for our perspective on the relevance of STEM training.

Lindiwe, who hails from Belfast in Mpumalanga, studied innovation and entrepreneurship at MIT and co-authored a white paper with her supervisor Marie-José Montpetit entitled Knit-2-Code which explains the science behind her revolutionary training method. 

The paper states: 

Knitting is very much computer programming and software engineering: 

• It uses two basic stitches, purl/knit, like 0s and 1s, organized in long sequences. 

• It combines these two basic stitches with other elementary operations, like twisting or combining or dropping, to create larger stitches, the “words” or syntax of a knitting language. 

• It relies on algorithms, knitting patterns, that arrange these words into an almost infinite number garments 

• It uses operations like do loops, if and case with very different results: scarves, mittens, sweaters, and shawls. 

• And of course it needs management to make sure to know when to stop and how to plan for the finished garment.

Lindiwe formed Africa Teen Geeks to put her ideas into practice. The NGO "provides computer science training in schools and in under-served communities. Computer science is NOT taught as standard in African schools. Our computer curriculum focuses on teaching how to use software, but gives no insight into how it’s made."

Lindiwe and her project manager Nthabi Sekhobela are setting up a computer lab in Megatong primary school in Mapetla, Soweto, which happens to be in my constituency. The computers are sponsored by Amazon and she has support from various other companies including Microsoft, Samsung and Google. 

A true entrepreneur, Lindiwe is teaming up with a group of US computer scientists to run a workshop in Soweto to coincide with the Global Entrepreneurship Congress taking place in Johannesburg on March 13-16. She rightly sees STEM training as essential for young people entering the workplace as the 4th Industrial Revolution places an ever-greater emphasis on technology.

I will be following her progress with great interest and am sure she will succeed in her mission, just as the three indomitable women in Hidden Figures did.