Bashuki Journal

Shree Bashuki Lower Secondary School 

I will note down the details of this pilot school as they happen. Bryan Berry 08:42, 7 March 2008 (EST)

Background

The School

Bashuki school has grades 1-8 and roughly 320 total students. It is located roughly 30 km east of Kathmandu at the top of a very steep ridge. Most of the teachers walk over an hour to reach the school. It is a poor school and most of children belong to the Tamang indigenous group, one of the historically disadvantaged groups in Nepal. We will pilot OLPC in grades 2 and 6 at this school. There are 37-40 kids in both classes 2 and 6.

Implementation team

Open Learning Exchange Nepal is the lead implementer for the pilot, cooperating with Nepal's Department of Education. The Danish IT Society has purchased the XO's for the pilot and the Embassy of Denmark in Nepal is covering the other costs.

From the Department of Education:

• Baburam Poudel - Deputy Director at the Department of Education, oversees the OLPC project in Nepal
• Kamal Kafle - Goverment's technical adviser to the project
• Arjun Aryal - government technical advisor

From OLE Nepal

• Rabi Karmacharya, Executive Director
• Dr. Saurav Dev Bhatta, Education Director
• Mahabir Pun, Networking and Infrastructure
• Sulochan Acharya, all technical matters at the school, esp. XO's and School Server
• Dev Mohanty, Network Technician for wireless links
• Ram Krishna Singh, power technician
• Bryan Berry, systems engineer, School Server, XO configuration, E-Library

There is also a activity development team at OLE Nepal that is working exclusively on creating constructionist learning activities for the pilot. They are less involve in the on-site implementation details.

Planning

Network

We have a full-time volunteer in charge of the network, Mr. Dev Mohanty. There is simply too much work to be done for someone to do this on a full-time basis.

We are using Point-to-Point 802.11g radios to provide Internet access to the school. We will put the Point-to-Point radio for Bashuki School either at the adjacent Military Post or on a tree situated on a high hilltop. The radio located near Bashuki will connect to a radio multi-point radio located at the Department of Education, 8 km east of the school and in direct line of sight.

We may use a 12 db omni-directional access point from Deliberant Networks, onsite at the school. We will likely not use the Active Antenna, at least initially.