OLPCorps MIT Mauritania Bababe

University: MIT
Team: Mary Wang, Owen Derby, Janet Li, Madeline Mirzoeff
NGO: Peace Corps
Local Contact: Zach Swank, Environmental Educator
Deployment Location: Bababé, Mauritania [Brakna Region]
Deployment Date: June 20th-August 29th, 2009

Proposal

Goal:
Our goal is to give children the tools they need to explore the world and learn independently of the rote memorization they are accustomed to. We want to empower them with the ability to share what they have learned, teach their peers and parents the new tools they have acquired, and express the ideas they come up with.

Project Set Up:

We are working with the Peace Corps [1] and volunteer Zach Swank on this initiative. Zach Swank is an environmental educator who has worked with schools in Bababe for two years now. He will provide us with an opening into the community, facilities to store and charge the laptops, and assist us throughout the 10 weeks.

Our deployment will be set up as a summer program for children in Bababe at Maison de Jeunes, a youth center established by the Ministry of Culture. Based on the information from our local contact, there will be more children interested in the program than we can provide for. Thus, we will choose a diverse group of 5th and 6th graders. In a male dominated education system, we will make sure that we provide equal opportunities to both genders.

Working with the Children:

The current school system in Mauritania is not very conducive to children's learning, due in large part to the deep poverty of the country and thus lack of resources available to students. Bringing in 100 laptops to a classroom of elementary school children will have eye-opening and irreversible effects on how they learn. Allowing each child to learn and explore the XO's one-on-one will give students the chance to be exposed to innovative technology and utilize the opportunities that come with it. The biggest opportunity is undoubtedly the Internet; the ability to access this infinite information database will give students the resources and desire to learn. We will also use the XO's as learning tools in the classrooms, teaching the children how to use the laptops to gain more understanding about each other and their own environment.

The children will learn how to use the XOs through interactive, multi-player games. They will be encouraged to explore the features of the laptops themselves. Then, they will design projects that they will work on in teams. Potentially, they will collaborate with children participating in our sister deployments in Kaedi, Tdjikja, Kiffa and Kankossa. Using the XOs, they will record what they observe, share the designs and ideas they come up with, analyze the information they find on the web, and present the results to their peers and parents. We will also work with Zach, the environmental educator, to create a project designed to teach children about the environment. We hope that this will foster a collaborative spirit in which students are eager to learn from and teach others, in addition to having a positive effect on the community.

In addition, we will work with local educational providers and Peace Corps volunteers to design lesson plans for schools to incorporate the XOs. Keeping the 5th grade public school education curriculum in mind, we will show the children how to take what they have learned and apply it in a new and interesting way.

Sustainability:

The Peace Corps has been involved in Bababe for 20 years now and is making no plans to leave. By training volunteers on the XO's who will pass these skills to new volunteers, our program will flourish long after we are gone. We will write a guide for the work we do in Bababe, keeping track of exactly what is going on and the reception by the children as references for future deployments. In addition, our local contact Zach Swank who will be heavily involved in the project will remain in Bababe for another year and help integrate the project into the school system. If successful, this project will serve as a pilot for new Peace Corps programs in Mauritanian education.

We will also encourage the children to keep in contact with our team by inviting them to email us photos, videos, stories and artwork and to keep us updated on their lives as they get older. There is also the possibility of setting up pen pals between the Bababe students and the students involved in the Cambridge, MA deployment near MIT. We will look further into this idea in the weeks leading up to this summer's deployment. This way, each culture can learn about the other and so that the Bababe children could speak with other kids their age from a different part of the globe, utilizing the english they learn in school.

Our team is also in the process of establishing an official student organization at MIT dedicated to overseeing our program, logistically, financially, and personally, after we return to the U.S. By becoming an official club, we will be able to apply to the MIT Undergraduate Association Finance Board for any funds related to our organization; this board receives around $200k every year to provide funding for student groups. In addition, we will be able to fundraise both on-campus, by holding university-wide events, and off-campus, by soliciting alumni for funds or by soliciting corporate sponsorships. These are all ways in which we will be able to provide financial support after we leave, in order to maintain internet connectivity, power, connections to servers, repairs, and eventual replacement of the laptops. In addition, forming an MIT group will further student interest in our program and in OLPC in general. By forming an organization, we hope to provide support and maintenance for existing programs and also to raise the necessary funds to send new OLPC teams to Africa every summer.