OLPCorps UIUC Kenya Anderson
Contents
Team
Eric Anderson (UIUC) – Project Lead
Ben Dobbins (UIUC) – Pedagological Lead
Leslie Cornell (UIUC) – Technical Lead
Meghan Higgenbotham (San Diego) Cultural, Financial, and Logistics Lead
Matthew O'Rourke (Wisconsin) – Fundraising and Sustainability Lead
MODEL-ITU Youth Organization
By equipping youths with ICT skills, we hope to enable "children and youths to exploit their potentials, learn from one another, and promote positive cultural diversity and global understanding" (http://projects.tigweb.org/model-itu).
Through Model-ITU Youth Organization-Kenya, we will work to upstart an interactive free-time school called the ICT School of Cyber Peace and Internet Safety (ISCPIS). It will be located at KU Primary School on the outskirts of Nairobi. The school mainly enrolls orphans and children from poor families and slums. Our main local contact is Michael Owino (alex.owino@gmail.com). In addition to bolstering Model-ITUs current goals, we will deploy 100 XOs to introduce the XOlympics to the ICT School.
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Site
The school has 600 pupils aged 6-12 with reliable electricity and good security. We will store the laptops in the school. It has the space, security, and power supply to support the laptop delivery and project.
The children will be in school from May until August. They speak English. Students partaking in ISCPIS will gather in the school hall for three hours after class on weekdays and six hours on weekends. We chose a bigger team to maximize individual interaction with the students and to manage our project: the XOlympics.
The XOlympics
Although there may be more children than laptops, we plan to engage all ISCPIS children with the XOlympics. The XOlympics will initiate daily and weekly activities that award creativity, teamwork, and innovation. It will be a fun way to ensure wide learning. It will spark dialogue about the XO that children will bring back to their social groups.
XOlympics events will allow the children to become citizen-journalists, scientists, mathematicians, musicians, film makers, programmers, gamers, writers, and dramatists. Students will need to use critical-thinking, teamwork, creativity, and their XOs to succeed.
For example, "Wildlife Explorer" will involve filming wildlife and researching biology. "Good Deed" will involve photographing themselves helping the community. "Clue" will include a scavenger hunt where children must solve puzzles with the XO.
We will oversee small teams of students as they work on the XOlympics challenges. Students will develop team names, crests, mottos, and theme songs. They will maintain team and individual blogs. They will use writing and video journals to reflect on the experience.
Students will work in teams on a longer project, too, that they will present at the bi-annual Peace Camp. February 2009 Peace Camp
Our project will conclude in an XOlympics awards ceremony where we will recognize students for exemplary work using the XO. Students will present projects in front of peers and the community.
Sustainability
We will sustain the project in three ways:
1. We are currently forming partnerships with US middle schools to sustain virtual pen pals. The program will be mutually beneficial, linking the Kenyan children with American students in a cross-cultural dialogue that will further awareness and friendship on both sides of the world.
2. The MODEL-ITU Youth Organization in collaboration with the school management will carry on with the project, monitoring and evaluation activities. The children will also share their experiences amongst themselves in a way that will generate curiosity on new interested group of participants. This will ensure that children using the skills acquired become agents of change in their social groups and positively translate the outcomes of the project into action.
The local group is capable of carrying on with the project since it already has a similar project in Kenyatta University where its student’s volunteers train their colleagues who join the university from rural areas on basic ICT skills in collaboration with the directorate of e-learning.
The success of the initiative relies on the children’s ability to go back to their social groups and spread the outcomes in an educative way by passing and sharing information boldly to ensure replicable sustainability.
3. Eric and Ben plan to develop a OLPC Registered Student Organization at the University of Illinois to spread the OLPCorps among more university students and uphold bonds to MODEL-ITU.
Support
These support groups will help us implement our project, troubleshoot any technical difficulties, and streamline blogs to the internet.
University of Illinois Informatics Institute: https://www.informatics.uiuc.edu/display/HOME/Home
US Technical Support: Troy Campbell Long: troycampbelllong@gmail.com
Graduate Library of Information Sciences (UIUC): http://www.lis.uiuc.edu/
Budget
OLPCorps UIUC Summer 2009 Kenya Budget
