bloom: Cindy Smits

Cindy Smits, the chief of Digitale Wolven tells us about how her team is improving the digital skills of 75,000 children. She reaches 50/50 girls and boys with her programme and explains how she managed it. We also talk about her daily challenge to fight for funding. For example, Cindy wants to ensure that the fully booked agenda of  Digitale Wolven not only covers the schools where they currently work, but also allows them to expand further. 👇

The road to tech

"It has always tickled my fancy, so after a small diversions I ended up in the technology sector after all." Cindy begins her story. She studied applied computer science at the end of 2000, but then found that programming was not really her thing. She then went to work in other sectors, but after a number of years in administrative positions, she got the itch again. Her husband did work in tech and when he talked about his job, she secretly felt some jealousy. That inspired her to start working in the technical helpdesk at EDS (HP) and that is how she eventually ended up at Cronos as a consultant. She did that job for six years with Coca-Cola as her client. When she had children and volunteered in CoderDojo, a new idea came on her path: Digitale Wolven.

Where does your love for IT come from?

"When I was 9 years old (in 1989), we had our first lesson with computers in primary school. That day I came home and told my father what we had learned to do with these machines. Not much later there was a computer at our own home. My father had bought it with the message: 'You have to be ahead of the future!' My dad really got the 'computer virus' and I got infected too. At the time, he was the computer expert, but by now the roles have been reversed!"

Digitale Wolven

Meanwhile, you have founded Digitale Wolven and teach children digital skills, including coding. How does that work exactly?

"Our goal is to teach children and teenagers digital skills, from the 5 to about 18 years old. It is not our intention to turn them all into programmers, but to introduce them to the digital world and technology. Digital skills are much more than just making a presentation or sending an e-mail. A few years ago, Martine Tempels said 'Computer science is not bureautics!' I thought that was very appropriate. In the world of teachers, bureautics is more present; they work with Excel, PowerPoint, etc. and this is not the same as computer science. Coding is logical thinking. You learn to break down a large problem into several small parts. This is an approach that can also be extended to other things in life. We want children to realise what's behind programmes and digital tools; not just 'what' it does but also 'how', and in a fun and playful way. I call it 'self-reliance' because in almost every job, everybody is going to have to work with digital tools or IT. We do this during school hours and in every form of primary and secondary education."

Digitale Wolven offers a wide variety of workshops and curricula. A workshop consists of at least two teaching hours. Some schools take 1 workshop within a theme week, for example, other schools take several workshops on different subjects. Another offer is a complete learning line that lasts 10 weeks, with one lesson per week. The offer varies greatly depending on the vision of the school.

"Computer science is not bureaucracy! (...) Coding is logical thinking. You learn to break down a big problem into several small parts. That is an approach that you can also extend to other things in life."

Targetting girls with IT

Within the theme of gender diversity, which of course is what we work on within Clusity, we have seen that there are a lot of girls in your workshops. That is unusual for activities around technology and coding. How do you manage that?

"Like so many girls, I used to want to be a teacher or a hairdresser. In the end, becoming a teacher prevailed. Seven years ago, when my son had just started his first year at elementary school, I took him to CoderDojo. This was on Saturday mornings and therefore an extracurricular initiative. I saw what he was learning at CoderDojo and the level of coding he was already able to use. At the same time, I also saw what he was getting out of IT at school. That difference was so big that there wasn't even a tiny bit of overlap. Those were two different worlds. I also saw that parents would drop their sons off for the workshops and the little sisters who sometimes came along would then go back home with them."

Cindy thought that if she herself had not been interested in IT, her son would never have ended up at CoderDojo. A difficult realisation that children are actually dependent on the interests and judgements of their parents and their financial situation. This gave rise to the idea of bringing digital skills to children in an inclusive way; an offer on digital skills during school hours. In this way, they take a mirror of society with Digitale Wolven, which means, among other things, 50/50 girls and boys. If you compare this with extracurricular initiatives, you see that the numbers are very different there. So the difficult road to work within school hours is one with impact on the children who otherwise do not come into contact with IT because often parents do not find it important or cannot offer it.

Successes and challenges

What are your greatest victories?  

"I never dared to dream that Digitale Wolven would be so big after 7 years. Also that we have our own location and a classroom in Berchem is incredible. Sometimes I look around and then I think 'Wow, here I am in the middle of my dream! And when you add to that the number of children we have reached, it makes me really happy; this school year, despite Corona, we have reached 16,000 children. In the year we started, there were only about 200. In total, we have educated 75,000 children in the past seven years.

We just hope to inspire the children. I believe we are succeeding in this; we sometimes see this in our evaluation forms, or a mother or father telling us that their daughter or son decided to choose STEM thanks to the summer class or a workshop. Yes, those are wonderful moments. Of course, it doesn't happen to every child out of 75,000, but it does give you the feeling of having succeeded.

What are your daily challenges? How do you deal with them?

Of course, there are also challenges at Digitale Wolven, as in any business. Cindy tells us that if they would let everyone who wants to book workshops, they would have to hire at least 10 more people. "We work with very few volunteers because we have chosen to run workshops within class hours and not out of hours. That means a permanent paid team. In this way, we can also ensure continuity and quality, but of course it has an impact on our costs. That is also the reason why similar initiatives are often after-school just to avoid this cost factor and be able to work with volunteers."

Unfortunately, schools have a maximum invoice that cannot cover the full cost. Then there is the cost of equipment: laptops, robots, and everything for different ages. For the capacity they currently have, they can still make ends meet, but to keep up with the growing demand, more capital is needed. "Having to say 'Sorry, we're fully booked' is really a shame," says Cindy. They try to cope with this through subsidies and sponsors. The Cronos Group is of course the main sponsor and umbrella organisation. Thanks to Cronos, the initiative was born and could grow into what it is today. Cindy's challenge lies in finding more such good sponsors. She is particularly interested in partners with a focus on society and a long-term vision.

Cindy dreams of working with a department per province. At the moment, they have a room in Antwerp (Berchem). With more physical presence, they would be more accessible and reach more schools and children. Another of Cindy's dreams is to cross the border into the Netherlands or to bridge the language border in Belgium and have Digitale Wolven also work in Wallonia. So grow!

Networks

Who would you like to meet and why? 

"I would like to meet the Minister of Education, so that's Ben Weyts at the moment. If you know that we have reached 'only' 16,000 children this school year, we can do much more in Flanders! I would like to talk to Ben Weyts about what my ideas are and understand better what his vision is. What he worries about and where the priorities lie. Up until now, we have no cooperation with the Department of Education and I would like to talk to him about that. It could give our concept an enormous boost if we would get officially recognised. We are all about bringing much-needed digital skills into education. Schools do get resources to buy equipment like laptops or tablets but I see a lack of knowledge on the human side of that technology; how do you motivate students and teachers to really use the equipment? It has never been clearer than during the period of COVID homeschooling how crucial digital skills are."

Cindy Smits, a warm and passionate entrepreneur, makes us think about technology for children and the skills that go with it. What we also remember is that in this age, digital skills are important for everyone, regardless of demography or culture, but are not always accessible. Would you like to know more about Cindy? You can find her on Linkedin.