In grade 9 we signed up my son to the UoT DEEP program. It was a 4 day session run by UoT students and professors designed to expose high school kids to Engineering. The kids stayed in dorms, lived like a university student, and were taught to build a small remote controlled robot car and had a battle-of-the-bots for the parents at the end of the week.

My son loved it. 12 years later he is a graduate of mechatronics from UoG and has a job at a high tech firm.

Not all kids are going to love to code or be an engineer but if we don't expose them to it we won't have the right skills in our labour force to succeed. Today we have thousands of temporary visa workers from India and other countries to fill our IT skills gap while many of our kids with liberal arts degrees are unemployed or underemployed.

Let's expose these kids to coding, engineering, robotics, space and finance. Anything that gives them an opportunity to succeed. Whether they take advantage of it or not.