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 pilot will begin on the first day of the Nepali school year, April 14th.

Community

Bashuki School is located in the village of Lakuri Bhanjyang, situated high upon a hill ridge roughly 1 hours walk from the main road. There is a coarse gravel road leading to the school that is only accessible by motorcycle or a 4-wheel drive vehicle. Here is a view from the school roof down at the Kathmandu Valley.

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.

The combined implementation team has been working together for over 4 months preparing for this pilot. It has been our experience so far that an OLPC pilot requires a significant amount of human resources. It would not be possible to implement a pilot in Nepal without full-time staff. We do not think it could be accomplished w/ a team of part-time volunteers. The OLE Nepal team includes volunteers, but the core team works on the project full-time.

I have discussed the matter of full-time staff with Amit Gogna, the lead implementer for India's first pilot at Khairat. He agrees that an OLPC implementation, even for a single school, requires full-time staff. His team has a total of 7 persons. One of the goals for our implementation team is to streamline the implemenation process for OLPC so it can be implemented with a minimum of human resources and use local resources wherever possible.

Planning

Network

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.

Power

Stable electricity is a significant problem everywhere in Nepal. Currently the school only receives 16 hours of electricity per day. This should decrease to 15 or 14 hours per day by April. Hydropower generates most of the electricity for Nepal's energy grid and the amount generated decreases steadily during the dry season, October - May.

Power is also of low quality, with frequent brownouts and power spikes. The power strips available in Nepal are of very low quality, there is high chance that children will shock themselves while removing their plug from the power strips. It is not uncommon to see a spark when you insert a plug into the particular power strip available in Nepal.

We will install a “charging rack” at the back of each classroom. The children will unplug the XO’s and use them at their desks untethered by power cables. There will be a space and charger for each child’s XO in the rack. We do not plan to run power cables to the desks. The chance that kids will trip over power cables is just too high.

We would love to use the Xoctoplug for power distribution should it become available. It is much more elegant and safe manner of distributing power than regular power strips. We would place the Xoctoplug in the middle of 4 desks and the kids would plug into the Xoctoplug. Since the Xoctoplug distributes DC current it is much more efficient and safer than an AC power strip. Additionally we could daisy-chain two Xoctoplugs together so that we would only have live power cable per 8 kids, as opposed to one live power cable for every 3 kids which we would need for power strips.

We will install power inverters in the school to maintain power during power outages. We will keep the inverters in the same location as the School Server.

School Server

We will keep the school server and power inverters.