SINGAPORE — As Google expands its headcount in Singapore, the tech giant wants to help develop more young Singaporeans into technologists.
Over the next three years starting January 2017, Google will organise coding classes for 3,000 students, aged between eight and 15, from low-income homes.
Sign-ups will open next month, and each batch of participants and their parents will start off with a visit to the Google office.
This was announced as Google officially opened its new office on Thursday (Nov 10) in Mapletree Business City II, where it occupies two blocks. From just 24 Googlers — as Google employees are called — occupying an office in Collyer Quay in 2007, the company’s head count in the Republic today numbers 1,000, double its 2013 staff strength.
The move provides much-needed room for its “growing engineering team”, said Mr Caesar Sengupta, vice-president of Google’s Next Billion Users team.
(Levitating plant pots like this one greets visitors at the reception area of Google’s new office.)
Explaining the move to launch the Code in the Community programme for needy students, Mr Sengupta said: “We feel like many professions here have a very high level of respectability and we want to make sure technology and the creative industry get to that point where kids, parents, families want their children to grow up to be technologists.”
Google will ensure that at least half of the children who join the programme are girls. “One thing important to us is to make sure there’s diversity. That’s why at the start we want to make sure that all different communities can participate in this programme, also different genders can participate,” he added.
The Code in the Community programme will be held in partnership with four self-help groups — the Chinese Development Assistance Council, Singapore Indian Development Association, the Eurasian Association and Yayasan Mendaki. Classes, run by 21C Girls and Saturday Kids, will be held at four community centres during weekends.
21C Girls is a registered charity that develops and delivers free coding classes to girls in Singapore. Saturday Kids is a programming school for children.
Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who was at the official opening, said: “It’s our programme to make Singapore a smart city – lots of ideas go into that. But we hope that Singapore… will be able to add something to Google, to help Google thrive, and in the process, Singapore thrives as well.”
He added: “Tech is disruptive. Your objective is to disrupt the world. It is so. We expect to be disrupted but at the same time we want to make sure that we come out on the right side of the disruption.”
