By Zika Bobby
Thirteen-year-old Emmanuella Oziofu Mayaki of Nigerian origin has set a new record as one of the youngest persons to be accepted into the university in the United States.
Emmanuella was accepted into the Programme for the Exceptionally Gifted (PEG) at the Mary Baldwin University, United States of America to study Computer Science in the Spring.
Emmanuella’s personal accomplishment at age 11, 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 the simplistic Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint to the more complex skills like programming and coding.
Her drive to share knowledge and positively impact people, especially the girlchild, led to her decision to launch the after-school, weekend and holiday club in Nigeria.
Her focus is on the girlchild, who falls within the age range of six 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.
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 for young girls around the world.
Also, in 2021, she was featured in CBBC’s My Life series for International Women’s Day.
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). They named her as their inspiration after researching their social justice issues around their target audience for their app.
Emmanuella was first offered a teaching appointment in the United Kingdom at 11, at the Southfields Primary School in Coventry, England.
Her preferred area of study is in the field of Computer Science. At seven, she developed a passion for Information and Communication Technology, beginning from the basics of desktop publishing which includes Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Corel Draw.
Sooner than she could imagine, Emmanuella gained 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.