NEWS: ICT courses for rural students

SUBANG JAYA: Maxis Communications Sdn Bhd is doing its bit to address the “digital divide.”

Under its Maxis Cyberkids Camp programme, the telecommunications giant trains the best students from selected rural schools in ICT (information and communications technology), before sending them back to their schools to train their peers.

The camp involves five-day courses in hotels, where Form One and Form Two students are taught how to research, build websites and how to make presentations.

The students are guided on how to use online tools such as flickr (a photo-sharing site), photoscape (a photo-editing application) and audacity (an audio-editing program).

Maxis said the programme is aimed at cultivating a generation of Malaysians who are ICT-literate.

This year, the programme brought together 336 participants from 42 schools in six states — Sarawak, Sabah, Pahang, Selangor, Perlis and Malacca. Maxis works with the Ministry of Education to select the schools and students.

Sandip Das, chief executive officer of Maxis, said: “Our intention is to enable equal opportunities for schoolchildren in technology-disadvantaged areas and hopefully make a positive difference.”

“The camp is part of Maxis’ commitment to nurture the country’s school children towards supporting national aspirations in the area of technology, education and youth development as they prepare for future challenges in the global environment,” he added.

Cyberkids participant Nur Ainina, who is a student of the Kuala Lumpur International Airport Complex secondary school in Nilai, said the programme gave her more knowledge of the Internet and has taught her to to create content instead of just consuming it.

The camp, supported by the Ministry of Information, Communications, Culture and Arts, is Maxis’ flagship corporate social responsibility programme under its Maxis Bridging Communities initiative, was launched in 2002.

To date, the Cyberkids programme has conducted more than 93 camps for more than 5,000 school children and 2,500 teachers from rural districts nationwide. For more information on the programme, log on to http://maxis.cyberkids.com.my.