OLPCorps UD Tanzania

Specifics

Team Members: Fratern Tarimo, Jeff Mascornick [1], Cate Elander

Location: Tarakea - Kilimanjaro, Tanzania

Target School: St. Pius Academy

Local NGO Partner: Trans Regional Environment Technology Association (TRETA)

US Classroom Partnership Partner: David Stein, Senior Schools Partnership Coordinator, Duke University Office of Community Affairs [2]

Process

Recognizing that the curriculum at the school is very structured to ensure compliance with end of year tests, the XO Learning Program will take place after school and on Saturdays. The children will be on holiday until July 1st, which will allow team members time to train the teachers before the children arrive. Once the children return to school, the laptops will be deployed to the older children through after school and Saturday school training sessions. The older students will then be paired with children in lower grades for peer to peer (yet supervised) training. Laptop use will be integrated into actual classroom learning if and when deemed appropriate by teachers to ensure the support of the teachers and to afford them appropriate consideration and respect. By the end of the program, students will be comfortable creating content by uploading pictures/audio to an interactive educational site,such as: Voice Thread[3] or a similar service. The students in Durham will be doing the same, using their computers at school. In addition to the cultural enrichment via a constructivism model of learning, funding will be secured to allow children in Durham to select community improvement projects in Tanzania that have been identified by the children in Tarakea and posted to fundraising sites that aggregate many small donations from anywhere in the world – for instance: DonorsChoose [4], Global Literacy Foundation [5], GlobalGiving [6] or by creating our own site for this purpose in order that it may be used by other OLCP projects. Using the St. Pius community center, the students will also have the opportunity to invite their families and friends to view these wikis/websites, including the cultural exchange information as well as the progression of funding for the community projects identified by their children.

Goals

• Cross-cultural education

• Increased peer-peer learning

• Empowerment of students as change-makers

• Empowerment of students in the collaborative creation of content in a true open source environment

• Community support

Why We Chose St. Pius Academy

Due to the proposed partnership with elementary school students in the United States, we wanted to begin working with an English school in Tanzania. Local community members in Tanzania highly value opportunities to learn English because most universities teach their courses in English, and the language is crucial to success in the business world. St. Pius also has a community center where the children would be able to teach other community members to use the laptops, as well as present their work to the community. Our team also has a strong relationship with the school; Fratern Tarimo's mother is the Vice-Chair of the school's board of directors. In addition, St. Pius has an electric hook-up. The students' capacity for English, the electric hook-up and community center, and the strong relationship all significantly contribute to the sustainability of the project once the team members leave.

Sustainability

• Strong relationship with Vice-Chair of Board at St. Pius

• Regular volunteers through the Volunteer Tanzania Program with Kuro Expiditions

• Strong local support network (high accountability)

• Revenue generated through community use of internet and proposed computer classes at the St. Pius Community Center

• Flexibility of graduating team members (to stay in the area until program is operating without team support)

• Strong leadership through Duke University Office of Community Affairs (stateside support of classroom partnership)

• Potential for fundraising through project promotion on sites that aggregate individual donations those listed above or by creating a new site for this purpose (which will be funded independently of this project). One of the team members, Jeff Mascornick, will investigate the feasibility of creating a website for this purpose. Again, we would like to stress the potential transferability of this approach to other OLPC projects and we encourage and would value input on this idea.

Opportunities for Replication

Although we have chosen to begin our work at St. Pius, there are multiple schools in the immediate area who would be good candidates for laptop deployment as well. Due to Fratern Tarimo's extensive family and business connections in the area, multiple teams could work in Tarakea without overburdening the local support system. The Duke University Neighborhood Partnership has also identified multiple schools to serve as partner classrooms for the cross-cultural learning program. If OLPC Africa Corps is amenable, to reach saturation at St. Pius, we propose to deploy approximately 250 laptops. Additionally, other teams could be deployed to this area to bring laptops to other local schools.