The SAP Knowledge and Education organization welcomes more than 200,000 customers and partners every year for training and educational sessions worldwide. In Walldorf alone, around 2,000 sessions are held annually.
For the first time, SAP Chief Knowledge Officer Bernd Welz and his team opened 15 training centers in Europe during this year’s EU Code Week. Under the motto of #LearningForLife, around 100 SAP trainers and employees volunteered to organize various special coding events for young people to show them how much fun and how creative coding can be.
Lifelong Learning at SAP
Coding runs the digital world and impacts our daily lives, so anyone understanding this language is able to actively and creatively shape the future of tomorrow. SAP is committed to ensuring everyone has the skills needed to thrive in a digital world and the SAP Knowledge and Education organization is helping to make this vision a reality.
On October 12, 500 kids were introduced to Snap!, an easy-to-use graphical programming language that was jointly developed by SAP and the University of California at Berkley as open source software. Snap! allows beginners to take their first steps in programming using simple graphical blocks and it also offers sophisticated abstractions, usually only found in advanced programming languages for artificial intelligence (AI).
Together with the Snap! trainers and mentors, the children could develop their own small art projects.
“I didn’t realize how easy coding could be. It was definitely a great learning for me as well” said one of the trainers in Walldorf.
Not only did the newly educated trainers benefit from the experience, but all the children who participated did as well: “At school I saw other kids already work with computers, but it looked really hard, so I haven’t tried it yet. But it’s really simple and was a lot of fun to program my own picture,” mentioned a 10-year-old girl from fifth class.
The 15 events were a great success and Welz proudly proclaimed: “If we, as one of the biggest software companies in the world, don’t start educating our kids in coding, who will? It was great to see so many engaged students and trainers, which is why we want to continue our support and drive our learning for life vision.”
Anyone interested in Snap! can visit https://snap.berkeley.edu/ or sign up for the openSAP course, “Get Coding with Snap!” Register here.
