MORE than 60 students from high schools across the Kingston metropolitan area, Portmore and Spanish Town benefited from a recent Peruse Unboxes workshop on website development at Portmore HEART Academy.

This workshop, held April 28, was the first in the Peruse Unboxes workshop series aimed at fostering science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) skills among adolescent boys and girls, particularly those from marginalised backgrounds, including students from the deaf community and low-income families.

Held just three days after Girls in ICT Day, the workshop introduced the students to the basics of business and website development using WordPress, an open source software used to create websites and mobile applications (apps). Facilitated by Ricardo Thompson, co-founder of Niritech Digital Services Limited, the students were assigned to groups which presented their website solutions at the end of the workshop. The workshop was hosted by Original Peruse Limited in partnership with Niritech Digital Services Limited, Digicel Foundation, Progressive Grocers of Jamaica, and Rainforest Seafoods.

The workshop is part of Peruse’s ongoing commitment to providing affordable educational resources, enabling students to discover a range of STEM skills by addressing real-life challenges. This initiative aims to break barriers by providing upskilling opportunities to students who have limited access to STEM education.

“We are thrilled with the success of our Peruse Unboxes workshop at the Portmore HEART Academy, and it was remarkable to see our vision for more inclusivity in STEM come to reality as we listened to a diverse cohort of students, including those who are deaf, present their websites that they created in a few hours,” said Sheryl-Ann Thomas-Scott, managing director of Original Peruse Limited.

Students also expressed their appreciation for the workshop experience, highlighting their experiences including learning how to create a website without coding.

The Peruse Unboxes workshop series is designed to create a vibrant community of parents, teachers, and mentors dedicated to upskilling students with the essential STEM and digital literacy skills essential for Jamaica to compete in the global labour market.