The CHANGE is the possibility for a brighter future for our children!
Due to personal reasons Polly Yankova, founder MindHub, can not continue her participation in the contest PROMYANATA. As of January 26th MindHub will no longer take part in the campaign for online voting of the contest.
Polly set up MindHub in a bid to teach children the basics of programming and give them a chance to succeed in the jobs of the future. She is an economist by education with experience in sales, and before creating MindHub, she worked as children's teacher in mathematics.
The idea of MindHub was born in the heads of Polly and her husband in end-2015, while they thought about the future of their child and the future of all other children in Bulgaria. The couple had a dream – that all children should get education that was good enough and a chance to develop here – in Bulgaria, without the need to leave the country and study abroad.
Thus, Polly decided to set up an organization that could help children get high quality education in their homeland. Furthermore, she believed that in order for young people to be successful in the future, when they will have to work jobs different from the ones we have today, they will need much more analytical knowledge, software skills and even basic software understanding. These will be needed in much more professions, not only in IT. Polly believes that this should no cause fear among the parents, but should rather give them direction in their efforts to prepare their children for their future careers. This is why she set up MindHub.
THE CHANGE she aims for:
MindHub is a technology education organization that teaches children the basics of programming.
Today's children become familiar with technologies in their very first years, but use them only as consumers. MindHub's goal is to target their interest at learning and developing by using technologies. Through their lessons in programming, the team develops the logical and analytical thinking skills of children, their creativity, as well as their abilities to solve complicated problems, thus helping them be more successful – even in everyday situations.
They use an original school curriculum, which is fully project-based. It allows children to start their education at the age of six and complete it by learning a programming language when they are 10. The curriculum maintains and develops the children's interest, because it teaches them through special games and tools to train children in programming, developed in line with their age. A variety of software development environments is used, as well as hardware tools, board games, drones and robots, whose behavior can be programmed by the kids.
The youngest enthusiast use software with multiple instructions in the form of pictures. Without even being able to read, children are able to arrange a programme, which is then implemented by a software character or a robot. As the kids advance in their training, the programmes they use and create become more complicated and start featuring text instructions – code blocks, which they apply when creating various algorithms. The 10-year-olds progrmame, using a visual programming language, gradually moving on to studying a programming language which they then use to create virtual worlds, games, various missions featuring robots and painting using codes.
An important element of MindHub's technology is the fact that computer training goes hand in hand with real life games. They work with the children every day to build their social skills – working in a team, presenting their projects in front of a group of people and distributing tasks within the team.
Only two years into its existence since 2015, apart from Polly, MindHub's team now comprises another 16 people working in five cities – Sofia, Plovdiv, Veliko Tarnovo, Ruse and Varna. They are planning to build a network of schools across Bulgaria, where they can train their pupils to programme based on MindHub's curriculum and methodology.
Polly and her team invest a lot of passion and new ideas in a bid to make school training more interesting and create an environment, where children can stand out and develop their potential.
Learn more at: www.mindhub.bg