University of Pennsylvania OLPC

Developing Brighter Futures (DBF) Project in Cameroon

Background/Area of Focus and Partnership

As a country that has made significant strides in infrastructure and achieving stability, Cameroon stands at the threshold of being able to seize the opportunity to move forward in a multitude of areas. While the education system in Cameroon has staked its success on assuring high attendance (one of the highest in Africa) most children do not find a way out of the poverty that persists in 40% of the population, and in a greater majority of those in rural areas. The key to changing this situation is not through bringing more children in to the school system, but reforming the system to focus on a child centered model that encourages children to seek out answers and solve problems for themselves rather than the rote memorization that most schools employ. The XO laptop is the perfect vehicle for this change and working with NGOs such as United Action for Children that have already recognized the need for a different approach to education allows the XO to be the catalyst for realizing these reforms.

The United Action for Children is an NGO based outside the town of Buea. Founded by Mr. Orock Thomas Eyong in 1996, its main facility is the Jamadianle school that has grown in size and stature as a superior education environment that focuses on individual attention and smaller classes that break free of the rote learning of the public school system. The success of the Jamadianle school has lead to various efforts on the part of Mr. Orock to expand the opportunities offered there to the surrounding villages that lack the resources of the innovative Jamadianle school. The UAC has established several new programs focusing on expanding its mission, among them the Schools on Wheels project made possible by minibuses donated by another partner. With the Jamadianle school and its resources as our base, we plan to use this program to bring our 100 XO laptops to one of these rural villages, Nchemba II, where the small student population will allow us to achieve saturation at the 1 to 1 ratio recommended by the OLPC. During afternoon educational sessions, the children will work on projects with their new laptops and will then bring them home to continue to interact with the computers and their families in the evenings. (We will pick up the laptops in the morning so that they can be used for classroom projects at Jamadianle School during the morning summer sessions there, as well as charged and maintenanced if need be, and then they will be brought back to the students in the afternoon)

Schedule of Deployment and Daily Plan of Action

Team DBF will arrive in Buea June 18th and after a day or two of tutorials where the IT staff and other figures at Jamadianle are introduced to the XO’s and given a tutorial, we will begin bringing them out to Nchemba II to introduce to the children and give out to them. After the basics of how to use the XO’s are covered, we will begin implementing various projects designed to use the resources of the XO’s as tools to guide the children in new directions with their learning. Possible projects include enhancing the One Child One Chicken program already in place by encouraging children to use their laptops to chart data on their chicken, such as feeding patterns, weight, egg laying, behavior etc. and draw conclusions from categorizing this data, as well as looking up animal care or creating a virtual scrapbook or blog about their chicken, or their lives in general. Children in the village will be encouraged to communicate via their local networks and explore the meaning of community in the context of these connections.

One special project we would be very excited to implement involves establishing connections across the ocean. The Philadelphia Freedom School program brings children in similar age groups together over the summer to enhance literacy and explore African history as well as learning in an engaging and proactive way. We would like to establish an email partnership between the children of this remote part of Cameroon and the children of inner city Philadelphia where the children can interact and learn from each other via this technology.

Impact, Sustainability, and Future Expansion

Throughout the 8 weeks we will be in Cameroon, we hope to bring the educational experience of the children living in this village to a new level where they feel empowered to explore and learn on their own. In this way the presence of the XO in their home will be a continued source of stimulation and fascination. We have no intention of removing all guidance at the end of the summer though, and Schools on Wheels will continue to guide the students with projects throughout the school year as well as encourage students to come up with their own projects that use their laptops. These projects could possibly lead to a presentation at the Jamadianle School itself, or even empower members of the community to come together to support children's education in this village. The IT staff at the Jamadianle school will continue to support the 100 XOs employed in Nchemba II even while they work with us to expand this program to the many other villages that the School on Wheels program reaches, and on even to the Jamadianle school itself, where the student body of 615 could benefit greatly from the resource of XO laptops.

Team Background

Siler Bryan is a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania majoring in International Relations and Modern Middle East Studies. He has extensive background in education with experience teaching ESL classes in his hometown as well as managing the mentoring program at West Philadelphia High School for the organization the Community Schools Student Partnerships, of which he is a member of the Executive Board. He spent the past summer teaching 3rd and 4th graders as part of the Philadelphia Freedom School program, where he had the task of writing innovative curriculum that focused on literacy and Afro-centric history as well as implementing a “teaching through doing” environment that encourages creativity and exploration through a variety of mediums including computers.

Mike Chen is a sophomore majoring in mathematics and linguistics. He comes from a strong family background of multicultural education and has assisted his mother in her business of developing educational materials for various diverse groups. He has significant technical experience including going on 3 years as an Information Technology Advisor (ITA) in the Penn computer labs, leading to ITA Manager of an entire College House computing system.

Sam Ribnick is incompentent