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CHIPY Practical Technology Programme
A 24-week practical programme across software, networking, robotics and web, taught to three age groups and ending in an integrated capstone project.
- weeks
- 24
- tracks
- 4
- lessons
- 24
Tracks
Software, data and AI
Python programming, data analysis, machine learning and professional practice.
10 lessons · 5 modules
Networking and security
How networks work, cabling, IP addressing, network design and security.
5 lessons · 3 modules
Electronics, robotics and IoT
Circuits, microcontrollers, sensors, actuators and connected devices.
5 lessons · 4 modules
Web development
HTML, CSS, JavaScript and back-end APIs.
4 lessons · 2 modules
Lessons
Open any lesson to see its objectives, materials and what you will build. Full notes are for enrolled students.
24 lessons
Week 1 · Software, data and AI
Your computer is a workshop
Every builder needs a workshop: a place to keep tools, materials and projects. For the next 24 weeks your computer is that workshop. Today you set it up properly and run your first program.
Week 2 · Software, data and AI
Variables, input and calculations
A calculator forgets everything after each sum. A program can remember values, ask people for information and reuse results. Today you build a trip-cost calculator a class treasurer could actually use.
Week 3 · Software, data and AI
Decisions and loops
Real programs react: if the password is right, let the user in; while the game is not over, keep playing. Today you give your programs a brain (decisions) and stamina (loops) and build a number-guessing game.
Week 4 · Software, data and AI
Functions and debugging
Good builders make parts they can test separately: a wheel, a motor, a switch. In code those parts are functions. Today you build the first version of Project 1, a grade calculator, out of small functions — and learn how professionals hunt bugs.
Week 5 · Electronics, robotics and IoT
Electricity, circuits and safe component handling
Software tells hardware what to do — but first you need to understand what electricity actually is. Today you will light an LED, measure what is happening, and calculate the resistor that keeps it alive.
Week 6 · Networking and security
How networks work
When you send a WhatsApp message, it does not travel as one piece. It is cut into small packets that hop from device to device until they arrive and are put back together. Today you find out what those devices are and how to see your own computer's place in the network.
Week 7 · Networking and security
Ethernet cabling: RJ45, T568A/B, crimping and testing
Wi-Fi is convenient, but offices, schools, CCTV systems and servers still run on cable because it is faster, more reliable and harder to snoop on. Network technicians make and repair these cables every day. Today you make one that really works — and prove it with a tester.
Week 8 · Software, data and AI
Lists, dictionaries and files: a student record manager
A program that forgets everything when you close it is not much use to a school. Today you learn to keep many records, give each value a name, and save them in a file — then you build the first real Chipy project: a record manager a teacher could actually use.
Week 9 · Electronics, robotics and IoT
Arduino: digital outputs and inputs (LED, button, buzzer)
In week 5 you lit an LED with a battery. It was always on. Today a tiny computer — a microcontroller — decides when it is on, and reacts to you pressing a button. This is how doorbells, microwaves, traffic lights and robots work.
Week 10 · Networking and security
IP addressing, subnets, DHCP and DNS
In week 6 you found your IP address. Today you find out what the numbers mean, who gave them to you, and how typing google.com becomes a number your computer can send packets to.
Week 11 · Web development
HTML: building the structure of a web page
Every website you have ever used — WhatsApp Web, KCSE results portals, M-Pesa statements, YouTube — starts as a text file of HTML. Today you write one by hand and open it in a browser. By the end of week 12 it will be your own portfolio site, showing the projects you have built at Chipy.
Week 12 · Web development
CSS: style, the box model and responsive layout
Last week's page had good bones but looked like a 1995 document. Today you give it a design — colours, spacing, cards — and make it look good on a phone, because most people in Kenya will open your site on a phone.
Week 13 · Networking and security
Designing a small office network in Packet Tracer
A local business — say a small clinic or a cyber café — has asked you to plan its network: six computers, a printer, a file/web server and Wi-Fi for staff phones. Real network technicians plan on paper, test in a simulator, then install. Today you do the first two steps in Cisco Packet Tracer, a free simulator used in networking courses worldwide.
Week 14 · Electronics, robotics and IoT
Sensors: measuring light and distance
A button can only say yes or no. Most of the real world is not like that: it is a bit dark, quite far, getting warmer. Sensors turn those changing quantities into numbers a program can use. Today you build a light meter and a distance meter — the first parts of the sensor monitor you will finish in week 15.
Week 15 · Electronics, robotics and IoT
Actuators: servo, buzzer and a parking sensor
Sensors are the system's eyes; actuators are its muscles. Today you connect the two with code and build a real product: a reversing/parking sensor that beeps faster as you get closer, with a barrier arm that lifts — like the ones at a mall car park.
Week 16 · Web development
JavaScript: making pages interactive with a sensor dashboard
HTML is the structure and CSS is the style; JavaScript makes a page do things — update numbers, react to clicks, load new data without reloading. Today you build a sensor dashboard that loads readings and shows them as tiles and a table. In week 22 your Arduino will feed it live data.
Week 17 · Software, data and AI
Data analysis: cleaning, statistics and charts
Your sensors can take a reading every few seconds — thousands a day. Raw numbers mean nothing until someone cleans them, summarises them and shows them. That someone is a data analyst, one of the fastest-growing jobs in tech. Today you analyse a day of classroom light readings.
Week 18 · Networking and security
Cybersecurity basics: passwords, Wi-Fi security and phishing
You now know how networks, websites and devices work. That also means you can see how they can be attacked. Today is about defence: protecting accounts, Wi-Fi and data — your own and other people's. These habits matter for every job in tech, and for you and your family today.
Week 19 · Software, data and AI
What is AI? Rules, data, learning and bias
"AI" is everywhere: in phone cameras, M-Pesa fraud checks, YouTube recommendations, chatbots, translation apps. But what is actually going on inside? Today you find out that a lot of AI is a simple idea — learn a pattern from examples — done at a very large scale. You will build the smallest possible learning program, and see how it can go wrong.
Week 20 · Software, data and AI
Machine learning with scikit-learn: training and testing a classifier
Last week your program learned one number. Today you use the same tools professional data scientists use — scikit-learn — to train a model that tells three species of iris flower apart from four measurements. It is a classic first project because the data is real, small and free.
Week 21 · Web development
Back end: a web API with Flask and a database
Your dashboard from week 16 shows data from a fixed file. Real apps — M-Pesa, school portals, Chipy itself — have a back end: a server program that receives data, checks it, stores it in a database and sends it to any app that asks. Today you build one in about 80 lines of Python.
Week 22 · Electronics, robotics and IoT
Internet of Things: from sensor to web dashboard
This is the week everything joins up. Your Arduino measures light and distance, your Python logger carries the readings to your API, the API stores them in a database, and your JavaScript dashboard shows them live. That chain — device to data to screen — is the Internet of Things (IoT), used in smart farms, cold-chain vaccine fridges, water tanks and factories.
Week 23 · Software, data and AI
Testing, debugging and using AI coding tools responsibly
Professional developers do not just write code — they prove it works, with automated tests. Today many of them also use AI assistants. That makes tests more important, not less: an AI can write code that looks right and is wrong. Today you fix buggy code with tests, call an "AI API" from Python safely, and judge an AI's suggestion the way a professional would.
Week 24 · Software, data and AI
Capstone: plan, build and present an integrated project
Twenty-three weeks ago your computer became a workshop. Since then you have written Python, crimped cables, built a network, programmed an Arduino, made websites, analysed data, trained a model and connected a sensor to the web. The capstone is where you show what you can do with all of it: a small, real project that solves a problem you care about.