Soliyana Guzaw Hunde, a 10-year-old coder in Ethiopia was the winner of the 2020 AfriCANCode Challenge
Guzaw love for maths and science and a strong community spirit inspired her to develop a fun and engaging way to practice math and raise awareness of COVID-19 related health protocols in Ethiopia.
She invented Mathstainment, an educational game developed which was built using Scratch programming language. It asks a series of maths questions that leads a character on the screen ever closer to personal protective equipment (PPE) for each correct answer. After a few incorrect answers, the player has to start over. The Maths questions are posed at varying difficulty levels, ranging from ‘Easy’ to ‘Difficult’.
Soliyana was inspired to learn coding after seeing the projects of her cousin, a software engineering student at one of the local state universities, was doing. “When I was eight, my cousin helped me take a short coding training course at a local centre. Since then, I have watched instructional videos on YouTube, and I have been motivated to keep practicing.”
