Botswana Accountancy College R Awareness Presentation
The very first awareness session of R - Ladies Gaborone was done at Botswana Accountancy College (BAC). School of Computing and Information Systems Lecturer Botlhe Moitho, arranged to have R-Ladies Gaborone give a presentation and a live coding demonstration of how R is used in Botswana. Botlhe believed it was a good platform because their 4th year students studying Business Intelligence and Data Analytics (BIDA) course will be using R programming for their final year. Botlhe is also part of WoTech Botswana ( Women in Technology) a committee led by women which aims to break the stereotype of computing being a male dominated area.
The presentation started with Simisani Ndaba, R-Ladies Gaborone member, talking about how R progranning is used in Sports recruitment, social media and in the different industries in Botswana such as insurance, banking and in academia. R - Ladies Gaborone believes it is important to raise awareness of using R programming for data analysis and creating data reports as it is an in demand and growing skill. The participant numbers grew as the presentation continued. The presentation was also done by Ontireste Ishmael, another R - Ladies Gaborone member.
Live Demonstration
The time for the live demonstration was done using Posit (formerly Rstudio) cloud. The laptop had trouble connecting to the internet, so it had to use Hotspotting to connect to the internet. Hotspotting is a technology that allows devices to connect to the internet using another device that has internet connectivity. Another BAC employee offered her phone to Hotspot from which was using mobile data subscription which helped the laptop open Posit cloud. While the laptop was connecting, Ontiretse talked to the participants about community organisation involvement and about her own experiences with other coding communities for young people.
The demontration used the Starwars dataset and analysed the Human and Species ratio, Species home planets and the showed the animated GDP increase in different countries.
Botlhe and the BAC students enjoyed the lunch time session and were excited for more sessions. Future sessions were talked about involving workshops on data visualisation and show and tell work having used R. To continue with sessions and workshops will mean having participants, however, most active members of Women in Tech at BAC are completing students who graduate an leave. Recruiting new members to participate is an ongoing activity, but both Women in Tech and R - Ladies Gaborone continue reaching out to help tech enthusiasts to improve their skills to be market ready.
Reach out
For more information on BAC you can send an email to Wotechbw@gmail.com and find out more about them at Wotech Botswana on Facbeook
