13-Year-Old ICT Genius gains US university admission

 


13-year-old Nigerian born Emmanuella Oziofu Mayaki has set a new record as one of the youngest persons to be accepted into the University in the United States of America. Emmanuella was accepted into the Program for the Exceptionally Gifted (PEG) at the Mary Baldwin University, United States of America, to study Computer Science in the spring. This was as she scored a 91 percentile mark of 1300 in her Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).

 

One of Emmanuella’s personal accomplishments at age 11, in the year 2020, was the setting up of an ICT Academy for girls in Abuja, Nigeria. It was her mission to provide sustainable empowerment for the girl child to acquire digital skills and to close the gap on digital literacy and this academy was for training and equipping youngsters in digital technology. It has a vision of securing the future of the girl-child.

 

The Academy, named ‘CodeKid’, which was incorporated under the Companies and Allied Matters Act 1990, on the second day of December 2020, with registration number (RC: 1741234), was set up to train the girl-child on the basics of computer literacy from simple Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint functions to the more complex skills like programming and coding.

 

The young tech developer and programmer has always nursed a strong drive to share knowledge and positively impact people, especially the girl-child. This led to her decision to launch the after-school, weekend and holiday club in Nigeria. Mayaki noted that this programming school was influenced by her experience with the United Kingdom (UK) after-school club experience, which she successfully duplicated in Nigeria.

 

Her focus is on the girl-child who falls within the age range of 6 to 15, and this included a beginners’ class to Information and Communications Technology (ICT) where newbies to the endless possibilities of ICT are tutored on Introduction to Computer, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, Desktop Publishing, WordPress, Graphics design, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, among others such as object-oriented programming - Python and Java. 

 

In addition, Data Science Nigeria, invited young Emmanuella as a guest speaker during their Interactive Workshop for kids and teens themed, “How to start a future in Data Science and AI”. 

 

Besides, in May 2022, she was nominated as a STEM icon by STEM Kids New York City (NYC). The organisation went on to name her as their inspiration after researching social justice issues around their target audience for their app.

 

Emmanuella was first offered a teaching appointment in the United Kingdom while she was aged 11 at the Southfields Primary School in Coventry, England. Her preferred area of study is in the field of Computer Science. The passion for Information and Communication Technology beginning from the basics of desktop publishing which includes Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Corel Draw came when she was aged just 7. 

 

Her passion and rapid rate of learning the basics encouraged Emmanuella to gain more knowledge about programming languages and augmented reality through online courses from SoloLearn and Udemy.

 

Some of the courses and certificates she obtained in pursuing this preferred career are a certificate in HTML fundamentals course, a certificate in PHP tutorial course, a certificate in CSS fundamentals course and a certificate in SQL fundamentals course.  Also, she obtained a certificate in JavaScript tutorial course and a certificate in JQuery tutorial course. She went further to obtain a certificate in Logic Building, Python and Java programming.

 

Emmanuella was nominated to be featured as a recipient in Microsoft’s Legacy Project Virtual Museum’s Women’s History Month Experience in year 2021. She was also identified as one of the most influential, ground-breaking female change makers of our time, and an inspiration foryoung girls around the world. In the year 2021, she was featured in CBBC’s My Life series for International Women’s Day.

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