13-year-old Nigerian ICT genius sets new record as she gains US varsity admission
Vondigest reports that a Thirteen-year-old Nigerian-born Emmanuella Mayaki has made history by setting a new record as one of the youngest persons to be accepted into a university in the United States.
The News Agency of Nigeria, NAN, reports that Mayaki was accepted into the Programme for the Exceptionally Gifted at the Mary Baldwin University, US, to study Computer Science in the spring.
Mayaki’s letter of admission made available to NAN in Benin read, “Dear Emmanuella, congratulations on your acceptance to the Programme for the Exceptionally Gifted at Mary Baldwin University! Welcome to the PEG class of 2026.”
This online platform gathered that she scored a 91 percentile mark of 1,300 in her Scholastic Aptitude Test.
One of Mayaki’s personal accomplishments at age 11, in the year 2020, was the opening of an Information Communications Technology Academy for girls in Abuja, Nigeria.
The academy was her mission to provide sustainable empowerment for the girl child to acquire digital skills and to close the gap on digital literacy, and for training and equipping youngsters in digital technology.
Mayaki said the academy had 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 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, which includes a beginners’ class to Information and Communications Technology.
Here, newbies to the endless possibilities of the 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.
