Cape Town teen girls to create private satellites
Meta Economic Development Organisation (Medo) unveiled their project to launch South Africa’s first private satellite in 2016 powered by a group of South African high school girls.
Pupils from across Cape Town attended the launch, where they were engaged in an interactive workshop and challenged to engineer their own ‘jiggy-bot’, an electrical device,using different mechanisms to light up a bulb and move.
The company started the initiative because of a profound lack of technical schools, and even less female students showing interest in the field.
Medo CEO Judi Sandrock told News24: “The intention of this programme is not to be a once-off. It is to be the start of at least a decade-long drive to inspire young people to enter the science and technical fields”.
The organisation said in a statement the programme is crucial in reversing the legacy of Apartheid which excluded maths and science from the curriculum of non-white children.
