OLPC Pakistan

2007 status: green
green

This is the wiki for the OLPC Pakistan. The mission of this Not for Profit Organization is to create an environment for OLPC, take necessary steps to ensure every child in Pakistan get the laptops and develop the Local Activities for OLPC laptops that could revolutionize how we educate the children. Our goal is to provide every children of Pakistan with new opportunities to explore, experiment, and express themselves.

It is unfortunate that in Dec 2006, the Education Minister (a retired general) didn't show any interest to OLPC mission to Pakistan. After popular elections of Feb 2008, a new government is in place and a professor is heading the Federal Ministry of Education. OLPC Regional Office in Islamabad was invited by the Ministry of Education to make presentation to a group of senior educational mangers on OLPC deployment in the country. A second presentation was done by Dr. Habib Khan to another group of school principals this week (April 24, 2008). These are all positive signs of a breakthrough any time.

OLPC set up its Regional Office

Assuming responsibilities as Director of Education for Central and South Asia, Dr. Habib Khan made an agreement with International Islamic University in Islamabad and set up the regional office at the main campus of IIU. Salman Minhas and Waqas Toor joined the OLPC team as developers and the localized work for Pakistan in Urdu. The XO Laptop terminology is mostly localized by Afghan students of International Islamic university of Islamabad (Usman mansour Ansari and Sohaib ebtihaj Ubaidi)for two languages of Afghanistan: Pashto and Dari.

First Pilot Project at Atlas School

Excited laughter and revived- energy marked the air, of the old rusty school the first day of the pilot project began in slum area called Pir Wadhai located between the cities of Rawalpindi and Islamabad). Eyes sparkled bright with excitement and gave way to numerous questions that sprung from everywhere. Students and teachers alike, all were eager to learn about the XO. A phenomenal change was observed amongst the teachers and students. Their relationship seems to have taken on a friendlier stance. Where teachers would previously use sticks to control the students, they now peacefully bond to discover the OLPC together. Some other interesting observations from the project are:

Observations

Most students did not previously know the ABC’s, however after a week of working with the OLPC, they began recognizing the alphabets and have started forming small words and can type their names. Kids who were previously familiar with the English alphabets, can now type using the ABI word activity. They have also discovered how to change fonts.

Camera & Tam Tam activities arouse the most excitement among the kids who repeatedly experiment with them.

Attendance records have risen in the school and more students are found attending classes after the introduction of OLPC’s.

Serious & stern looks on these underprivileged children’s faces have been replaced with excited smiles and laughter.

The children can now use ABI word activity. (Details are available on the other document attached.)

Atlas Pilot is going on very well accelerating kid excitement day by day. Children have gotten used to working with OLPC. For the first two weeks kids concentrated on Tam Tam and Video Camera. Now they are using the write activity for learning and how to write a letter.

Children are found of using the library to read story books in Farsi and browse through maps. They also discovered Multimedia (Watch & Listen) activity that we had downloaded from the wiki (we di not announce to children) to play Afghanistan national anthem and patriotic songs.

All 5th graders have explored e-toys and are helping others kids to use e-toys. Next week kids would learn to browse through the OLPC wiki for which we have acquired necessary wireless Internet. The purpose is to give children a good idea of Internet and how it works on XO.

The Principal has requested to slow down our visitation so children can prepare for their examination. We promised not to disturb his schedule during this monthThe pilot entered the 5th week and during this week the activities were confined to two days only as compared to six working days (Pakistan working days). The week was shortened because of school wide examinations. Children expressed their displeasure for the short week but they did enjoy the two days under the same roof and with their XO. They could share their activities.

Most of the kids however concentrated on the following two activities

TamTam Jam: as usual this activity remained on the top of popularity list amongst the children. To check how much they have learnt, Salman and Usman conducted a half hour musical session. All children and a teacher participated and room echoed with melodious tunes composed by children. Salman recommends the following link to appreciate kids efforts.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6834961190173238642&hl=en http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8408220617287387552&q=4+year+kid+playing+song+&ei=ZIwISOqNCYiG2QKlxaSvAQ

Two E-Books, Pashto Language for Grade IV, and “Learn English” for Grade V were explored by kids. They found them very helpful and learned instantly to use them. The most interesting part was Pashto to English Dictionary that was a part of the Pashto language book. Keeping in mind that the medium of education in this school is Pashto and children were not comfortable with English language but the dictionary in point was found very helpful in building confidence among them.
Regarding learn English, one kid Khyal Muhammad a 5th grader found it very challenging but two days of practice brought positive changes in his language skills. He is using XO to learn English and finds it easy and is assisting his peers.
Selected material from Web was the second source that we used to enhance children knowledge. Due to non availability of Internet we decided to give offline browsing option. For that we downloaded the free selected lessons and made them available for children in XO Library. Here we had to be confined due to limited memory. Here is one of the links that we used.

http://www.learn-english-online.org/Lesson5/Course/Lesson5.htm