The "One Million Uzbek Coders" Project Has Been Launched

On November 21, 2019, the launch ceremony of the "One Million Uzbek Coders" project was held in the Grand Assembly Hall of Inha University in Tashkent. The ceremony was attended by Abdulla Aripov, Prime Minister of the Republic of Uzbekistan; Mohammad bin Abdullah Al Gergawi, Minister of Cabinet Affairs and the Future of the United Arab Emirates; Omar bin Sultan Al Olama, Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence of the UAE; Sherzod Shermatov, Minister of Public Education of the Republic of Uzbekistan; Sardor Umurzakov, Minister of Foreign Trade and Investment of the Republic of Uzbekistan; and representatives of the Ministry for Development of Information Technologies and Communications of Uzbekistan. The "One Million Uzbek Coders" project was organized with the support of the Dubai Future Foundation of the United Arab Emirates, Inha University in Tashkent and the IT Academy under IT-Park.

The aim of the project is to teach information technologies to Uzbek youth through online platform courses in the Uzbek language and to train young programmers. Courses in 4 educational areas will be offered on the online platform, namely:

• Android development;
• Full-Stack Development;
• Frontend Development;
• Data analysis.

The courses are planned to last 120 hours; at the end of each stage, students complete homework and laboratory assignments and submit them online. Special certificates are then awarded to them.

The online courses will be organized on the basis of the training courses of Udacity, a company founded in 2012 out of Stanford University in the USA to promote the broad development of information technology and programming. That is, the courses there will be translated into Uzbek.

Students who successfully complete these online courses will be able to continue their education in more than 100 other Nanodegree programs on the Udacity platform. To do so, after finishing the courses they must successfully pass the final graduation exams and score as high as possible. Grants will be awarded to the 150 graduates with the highest scores. After completing Nanodegree programs, Udacity awards a diploma. Nanodegree diplomas are recognized by American companies such as Autodesk, Salesforce, Google, AT&T and other major companies around the world, and graduates may be hired according to their knowledge.

This project was first launched in the United Arab Emirates under the name "One Million Arab Coders." During the official visit of the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, to the United Arab Emirates in March 2019, an agreement was reached on cooperation between the Republic of Uzbekistan and the UAE in a number of fields. One of these agreements was to launch the "One Million Arab Coders" project in Uzbekistan as well. On the basis of these agreements, this educational platform was launched.

Similar projects had previously been implemented in some other countries of the world, including the Republic of Belarus.

As part of the opening ceremony of the project held at Inha, a panel discussion was organized, which you can watch below