About 16 000 of South Africa’s roughly 24 000 schools have no computers – yet a project born at Nelson Mandela University in Gqeberha has taught more than 350 000 learners to code, using little more than puzzle pieces and a cellphone.
Tangible Africa, founded by Professor Jean Greyling, head of the Department of Computing Sciences at the university, now operates on five continents reaching learners in nine African countries as well as Ireland, South Korea, Cyprus, Germany, and Indonesia. About 50 000 teachers have been introduced to its methods.
Speaking at the fourth Universities South Africa (USAf) Higher Education Conference in Tshwane, Prof Greyling described the “elephant in the room” in South African schooling. Many schools have no electricity or Internet either and, by his own estimate which he stressed was not scientific and probably conservative, 90% of teachers are not qualified to teach coding even though coding and robotics are now in the curriculum from Grade R to Grade 9.
For more than 25 years, Prof Greyling travelled to rural, township and urban schools in the Eastern Cape trying to interest learners in computing. More often than not, he was talking to children who had never seen a computer, in schools that often had no power. “I had this sinking feeling that I was talking into a vacuum and I was not having any real impact,” he says.
That changed in 2017, when one of his honours students, Byron Batteson, walked into his office and said: “Prof, I want to introduce coding to learners who do not have computers.”
Batteson went on to develop TANKS, a game that combines physical coding tokens with smartphone image recognition. Prof Greyling called it “the best honours project I’ve supervised in 30 years”. He credits Batteson with laying the foundation for everything that followed. Batteson is now a senior software engineer at Amazon.
The idea is simple. Small tokens, shaped like puzzle pieces, stand for the same coding instructions Prof Greyling teaches first-year university students. Learners get a challenge on a phone, work in groups to lay out their code with the pieces, take a photograph, and watch the program run. There is no need for computers, electricity or an Internet connection.
Teachers can be trained in three hours and go straight back to their classrooms to use the tools. And it has to be fun, especially in primary school. “If you take the fun aspect away, you are going to lose them,” Prof Greyling says.
“Tangible starts by making learning fun and accessible for both teachers and learners, while teaching the fundamentals of computational thinking and problem-solving,” he says. “Through the process, many learners gain the confidence to pursue mathematics, which is essential for STEM careers.”
Cost matters too.
The project works on a low-budget, and wherever possible no-budget, principle, and by Prof Greyling’s estimate about 90% of the schools that benefit pay nothing. Corporate partners help to cover the cost. The tools have also been adapted for blind learners using braille and 3D printing, and a young blind man who has followed the project will join as an intern next year to train other blind learners.
Coding has even become something of a spectator sport. The project’s biggest tournament, held during Mandela Month in July, started with 30 learners in 2018. This year it drew 50 000 learners from 500 schools, who used Tangible’s products 220 000 times in a single month.
Last year Tangible ran an online coding World Cup with 340 teams from 30 countries. South African schools took first and second place, ahead of Indonesia, the previous year’s winner.
Behind the games is a serious aim. Everything the project does is built on computational thinking “or in an easier word, problem solving”, Prof Greyling says: skills that matter in life, not only in coding.
He doubts the national coding and robotics curriculum will be implemented well, given the state of school infrastructure, so the project is trying to help teachers close the gap.
A chatbot offers lessons aligned with CAPS from Grade R to Grade 7, one a week for each grade, and all a teacher needs is a phone and a printer. Coding clubs then take Grade 9 learners through coding, design thinking, entrepreneurship and STEM careers to show them why mathematics matters before they choose their Grade 10 subjects.
He shares what he called “a scary statistic”: only 24% of Western Cape matriculants take mathematics, while 76% take mathematical literacy.
The project, an engagement project of Nelson Mandela University’s computing department, is run day to day by a non-profit, the Leva Foundation.
It has won the 2024 Institute of Information Technology Professionals South Africa (IITPSA) President’s Award, has been through two global evaluations – including the UNICEF-led Learning Cabinet – and in 2025 was one of 23 case studies selected for USAf’s Impact Initiative which showcases the societal impact of South Africa’s universities.
According to Prof Greyling, its work has helped make unplugged coding acceptable across the country – to the point where the Foundation Phase curriculum is now entirely unplugged.
For one young man, it changed everything.
Katlego Nyambi told the conference that in Grade 11 he was “directionless”. Then his school sent him to a Tangible Africa workshop.
“One of the most important things Tangible gave me was a clear direction, something to work towards,” he says. He became fascinated by programming, began looking at computer science courses at universities across the country and, for the first time, set real goals for his marks. “Because I do it more, I enjoy it, and because I enjoy it, I do it more.”
Prof Greyling fills in the rest.
After that first workshop, he wrote to Nyambi to tell him he could not study computer science with the marks he had. Six months later, Nyambi sent him his new results. His average had gone up by 20%.
Today Nyambi is a second-year computer science student at the University of Pretoria, with a bursary from Amazon. He still does not know why his school chose him for that workshop. “But they did,” he says. He is now “so in love with programming and everything computers, all because of that one point in time.”