CodeBrave Lebanon

CodeBrave Lebanon’s mission is to create a love of learning and improve the future job prospects of children in Lebanon by providing free high-quality tech education to children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Our vision is for children to have agency over their future, are not forced into unemployment or exploitative work, and have the digital skills to safely access more opportunities in life and work.

We design our programme, make key decisions, and hire and develop our team based on our five values of:

1. Child Focused: We care about our students and use a teaching approach based on educational psychology.

2. Empowerment: We believe in environments that enable students' personal empowerment. 

3. Healthy High Performance: We set the bar high, while maintaining a healthy work culture.

4. Radical Candour: We care about each other personally and challenge each other directly to be the best we can. 

5. Real Change: We want to make the kind of change that makes our students proud, not just our donors.

Eliana is CodeBrave’s Head of Programme, her role includes:

1. Team Management & Direct Reports: Oversee and support the Education Team and teachers, including supporting the HR Manager in recruitment of teaching staff.

2. Teacher Training & Coaching: Oversee the Teacher Trainer in running training sessions on Teaching Methodology, Child Psychology and Child Safeguarding using existing materials and support the update of the materials. Observe classes periodically and provide instant feedback; Motivate and support staff.

3. Strategic Planning: Facilitate the strategic planning process guided by the board, involving the management team and other key staff in identifying priority areas and setting objectives.

4. Programme Development, Evaluation and Monitoring: Ensure that resources are focused on delivering quality education through effective management and monitoring. Ensure the review and evaluation of programmes to ascertain that agreed plans and policies are implemented, and where necessary provide capacity building and technical support.

5. Curriculum Development: Oversee Curriculum Developers in the design of the coding and robotics curriculum, Scholars programme, and new projects.

6. Safeguarding: In partnership with the Head of Operations and the Education Team in delivering safeguarding commitments.

7. Partnership Building and Cooperation with External Stakeholders: Establish sound relationships with existing and potential project partners.

8. Representation: Represent CodeBrave in meetings with donors, government agencies, working groups.

Eliana is well placed to effectively support the LEAP project because:

• She has relevant technical and professional expertise with BE in Mechanical Engineering, an MA in Educational Psychology, both from the American University of Beirut and 10 years of experience teaching children.

• She has two years of education research experience as a graduate research assistant at the American University of Beirut. Her research work focused on refugee access to tertiary education, science education in multilingual settings, overexcitabilities, creativity and ADHD. She has had a paper accepted to the world council of gifted and talented children to be presented in August 2023.

• She developed CodeBrave’s tech education curriculum and teacher training program.

• She directly leads CodeBrave’s education team and monitors learning outcomes of the project to date.

Eliana will be supported by Inass Nawarn, CodeBrave’s Teacher Trainer, who has an MA in Educational Leadership, with more than 15 years teaching experience. Inass implemented CodeBrave’s teacher training pilot project.

Train school teachers to deliver up-to-date tech education to improve learning and future job prospects of disadvantaged children in Lebanon.

Digital illiteracy exacerbates inequalities: during the pandemic, communities without access to digital skills and devices were cut off from work and education becoming increasingly marginalized. In Lebanon, this has been compounded by decades of political and social unrest, and economic collapse. The already out-dated education system provides low levels of learning and skills mismatched to the job market. Youth are leaving school early, increasingly unemployed (over 40% of Lebanon’s youth are currently unemployed), or being forced into exploitative or unsafe work. According to the United Nations Economic and Social Commission, the multidimensional poverty rate in Lebanon has doubled from 42% in 2019 to 82% in 2021. Further, the World Bank’s 2020 Human Capital Index projects that children born in Lebanon will reach only 52% of their potential productivity when they grow up.

While at the same time, Information Technology is seeing exponential growth and ranking as one of the fastest growing industries globally. As such, there is a dire need to equip marginalized youth in Lebanon with the digital skills needed to access education and future employment opportunities of the digital world, and ultimately to lift themselves out of poverty.

Yet, the education system in Lebanon is ill-equipped to deliver this. Firstly, there is no existing coding & robotics curriculum to date. Secondly, there is a lack of qualified teachers in Lebanese schools to teach coding and robotics to prepare children for the 21st century labour market. The lack of qualified teachers is partly due to few accessible opportunities in Lebanon for teachers to qualify at teaching computing at k-12 level. Currently there is only one program available within Lebanon, which is a masters level program at the American University of Beirut, however it is expensive and thus inaccessible. While there are free online courses for teaching computing to k-12, teachers in Lebanon are severely underpaid and overworked, and therefore unlikely to undertake additional self-paced training without direction and support.

CodeBrave Lebanon’s goal is to address the lack of up to date tech education in Lebanese schools through delivering classes directly and also by training existing school teachers to deliver our curriculum. Through the LEAP programme, we want to focus on the latter.

By increasing the number of qualified tech education teachers through teacher training, we hope to broaden access to tech education for children and young people from disadvantaged backgrounds in Lebanon. With better access to tech education, Lebanon’s next generation can improve their cognitive and soft skills, which ultimately enhances their future employment opportunities.

We have developed a 36 hour in-person training for middle school teachers to deliver our up to date coding and robotics curriculum. We have tested our curriculum with 1,300 children to date through our CodeBrave teachers directly teaching in schools and through our scholarship program. Our teacher training program will see us build the capacity of schools to independently deliver high quality tech education by training their teachers. We will train their teachers on coding, robotics and child psychology in a four week program. We will then continue to provide ongoing support to said teachers as they implement the program in their schools, starting with students aged 11-12 in Grade 6.

CodeBrave Lebanon has considered learning variability since our outset in 2018, where we piloted our first intervention with children from traumatic backgrounds. Since then we have developed a trauma-informed curriculum, that takes into account gender inclusivity and native language resources to ensure that our students are given every opportunity to reach their full potential. We train our teachers to use differentiated instruction techniques in one of our teacher training modules.

When CodeBrave Lebanon was founded in 2018, we conducted a foundational desk review focusing on the importance of digital literacy and tech education. This review involved extensive literature reviews and desktop research, drawing on reputable sources such as ILO, UNICEF, McKinsey, World Economic Forum, UNDP, and others. Additionally, we mapped out the existing tech education opportunities in Lebanon. This foundational research provided valuable insights and best practices that influenced our curriculum design, for example ensuring a focus on soft skills in our programme.

To assess the effectiveness of our STEM program, we conducted baseline surveys and interviews with 72 children and their parents from a partner school in Beirut. Through these consultations, we gathered information on the students' interest in learning digital skills, coding, and robotics, as well as the concerns and aspirations of their parents regarding their children's future prospects.

When launching our teacher training programme in 2022, we conducted a pilot teacher training program in collaboration with teachers from one school. This research involved conducting user interviews, observing trainer-trainee interactions during the program, and assessing the technical competencies of the trainee teachers upon program completion.

For evaluating the impact of our programs, we use a monitoring and evaluation logical framework. This includes both qualitative and quantitative surveys with students, caregivers, and partner schools. We collect data through Google Forms and analyse it on Google Sheets using various indicators. These indicators include the percentage of students completing work experiences, internships, or securing scholarships, the percentage of stakeholders perceiving improved job prospects for students, student performance on assessments, student satisfaction, student assessment of teacher performance, and self-assessment of psychosocial skills, and student interest in further learning. We also conduct qualitative interviews with selected students and partner schools' leadership to gain deeper insights into program delivery, challenges, and impact.

Our foundational desk research provided valuable insights and best practices that influenced our curriculum design, for example ensuring a focus on soft skills in our programme. It showed us that there is a lack of accessible tech education opportunities for children in Lebanon, especially for those children from disadvantaged backgrounds. It also showed us that there is a lack of qualified teachers in Lebanon to deliver tech education.

Pre-project consultations with partners and teaching fellows usefully inform programme design, for instance whether it’s possible to run programming after school hours given transportation challenges.

The baseline data for our STEM programme collected from 72 students in Beirut mainly affirmed our existing beliefs and did not make a great difference to our design of the STEM programme. One interesting finding was that there was no difference in boys vs. girls’ self-perception as being ‘techie’ or their interest in learning coding, so we did find that for this age-group (12-13) we did not need to do extra interventions to encourage female participation (whereas for the 15+ age group, the gender gap becomes more noticeable). 

The formative research from our teacher training pilot project informed us that we needed to increase the number of training hours to give trainees sufficient time to build skills and knowledge. So we increased the curriculum from 20 hours to 36 hours.

Some of the data collected for our logframe has not proved particularly insightful. For instance, we tried to assess improvement in students’ psycho-social skills through student self-assessments and teacher assessments, but found students were not able to accurately self-assess their psychosocial skills and teachers struggled to fill out detailed assessments for children in a class of 20 students after only teaching them for a relatively short period. 

Our class experience form conducted with students is useful to see differences between centres and inform our teacher coaching. For example, survey results at one centre revealed that the students were not finding the classroom to be a conducive learning environment as the student to teacher ratio was too high, so we introduced a teaching assistant there to help.

Having proved our model and curriculum through direct implementation, we now believe that the most sustainable way to make change for young people in Lebanon is through building the capacity of existing school teachers to deliver CodeBrave’s curriculum. However, we are unclear about the difference in student learning outcomes when the curriculum is delivered by a CodeBrave teacher (who has been recruited and trained according to CodeBrave’s rigorous standards) versus being delivered by a school teacher trained by CodeBrave. We can assume there will be some drop in learning outcomes, however, we would seek to understand whether the drop is acceptable given the greater scalability of the solution. If the outcome is sufficiently positive on teacher training outcomes, we will be in a stronger position to make a case to education actors in Lebanon of the benefit and prove to donors that it is a fundable program. Alternatively, if the research shows that Teacher Training is much less effective than directly teaching students, we would pivot back to focusing only on direct teaching.

Through the research, we would look for insights on how to adjust the Teacher Training programme to make it more effective. 

Finally we would like to assess the impact of the CodeBrave Teacher Fellowship Program on Lebanese teachers’ ability and willingness to independently teach coding & robotics to middle school students going forward.

CodeBrave is at a critical juncture as we look to scale significantly in 2023 and 2024. There is high demand for our services in Lebanon from donors and schools. We want to ensure we proceed with a clear evidence base behind our solutions and only pivot towards Teacher Training if the evidence supports the quality of the student learning outcomes. The development sector so often pushes NGOs towards scale, “numbers reached” and efficient solutions, without sufficient focus on real change in students’ lives. The CodeBrave team has been focused on real change from the start, having grown up as a grassroots organisation that personally knew and was invested in the children involved in our first cohort. Our team involves three educational psychologists and child trauma experts, but we need the support of the LEAP programme to strengthen our evidence base around the effectiveness of the two solutions we are providing for children in Lebanon. The Teaching Fellowship is an exciting opportunity to scale our impact in a more financially sustainable way, but we need to ensure it’s not a false economy and that it will continue to align with CodeBrave’s values of ‘real change’.

In terms of research questions we would like the LEAP project to help us answer:

1. What is the effect of CodeBrave’s curriculum and approach on various cognitive and soft skills?

2. What is the difference in student learning outcomes when CodeBrave’s curriculum is delivered by a CodeBrave teacher versus being delivered by a school teacher trained by CodeBrave?

3. What is the effect of CodeBrave’s Teacher Fellowship Program on Lebanese teachers’ ability to independently teach coding & robotics to middle school students?

For our first research question we would like to determine the effect of learning coding on students’ various cognitive and soft skills. Our desired output produced by the LEAP Fellows would be a report with recommendations and guidance sourced from a mix of literature reviews and a meta-analysis to understand the impact of coding on such skills.

For our second research question we would like to compare the difference in student learning outcomes, based on various indicators, between programmes where CodeBrave’s curriculum is delivered by a CodeBrave teacher versus being delivered by a school teacher trained by CodeBrave.

For our third research question, we would like to determine the effect of CodeBrave’s Teacher Fellowship Program on Lebanese teachers’ ability to independently teach coding & robotics to middle school students. Our desired output produced by the LEAP Fellows, in partnership with CodeBrave staff, would be programme recommendations and guidance based on formative research through pre-tests and post-tests for our trainee teachers, and comparing this data to a control group of teachers attempting to learn by themselves.

A further output would include the training and professional development of CodeBrave staff to increase their knowledge and capacity for evaluation beyond the 12 week timeframe of this project.

The outputs described above will allow CodeBrave to:

1. Tailor our curriculum to ensure that we’re focusing on developing the essential cognitive and soft skills of our students. This will ensure that CodeBrave programs are reaching our learning outcome targets and youth have the skills to further their knowledge as well as future job prospects.

2. Tailor our teaching programme to ensure effective learning outcomes for our trainee teachers. This will allow CodeBrave to professionalise a teacher training programme that increases the capacity of teachers and schools across Lebanon.

3. Provide evidence to help us prove the effectiveness of our programme for advocacy purposes with government agencies and schools within Lebanon, partner organisations and with international donors. The education curriculum in Lebanon requires considerable updating, and these findings will allow CodeBrave to advocate for evidence-based tech education to be integrated in the formal curriculum.

Short term outcomes for the organization:

• Develop an evaluation for CodeBrave Lebanon’s programs which either show proof of impact and/or provide learnings for how to adjust activities to reach intended goals

• Build capacity of team members to engage in robust evaluation of programs and activities

• Share learnings with partners and other stakeholders working on similar issues in Lebanon

Long term outcomes for the organization:

• Build credibility of CodeBrave Lebanon’s interventions and programs 

• Increase long-term partnerships with other organizations and foundations with similar objectives 

Short term outcomes for the solution: 

• Increase the number of qualified teachers to deliver high-quality tech education in Lebanon

• Increase access to high-quality and sustainable tech education for children from disadvantaged backgrounds in Lebanon

Long term outcomes for the solution: 

• Children in Lebanon have improved future job prospects