Péter Mekis

External expert, curriculum developer, and trainer

Péter is a coding instructor from Hungary, with multiple years of experience in teaching underprivileged children.

In the past years, Péter worked at a Budapest based NGO, training teachers and talking at conferences, but first and foremost teaching kids of several age and interest groups, developing curriculum and teaching several workshops and courses.

A few examples:

• Creating electronic postcards, 90 minutes workshop in children’s homes, age: 5-10
• Game development in Scratch, 10 x 90 minutes workshop in children’s homes, age: 10-14
• Game development in Scratch, one day workshop for girls, age: 10-12.
• Building robots from household waste, one day workshop for girls, age: 12-14.
• Digital storytelling with Scratch, one week summer camp for roma kids, age: 8-14.
• Programming with Minecraft, one week summer camp for girls, age: 12-14.
• Data analysis and data visualization in Python, one week summer camp for girls, age: 15-18.

Previously to this, Péter used to work as Assistant Professor in the Department of Logic of ELTE, a Budapest based university. His courses covered various areas of formal logic, the philosophy of language, the foundations of mathematics, and the computational aspects of logic. He participated in developing the English language masters program ‘Logic and theory of science’.

He left the ivory tower of academia because he wanted to do something that has a real impact in society.
Teaching coding to underprivileged kids seemed to achieve this purpose. However, in the past few years, the political climate in Hungary has moved towards autocracy, and does not favor NGOs, or any kind of charitable activity. He decided to leave the country on account of these developments, in search of higher standards of democracy and freedom.