In the office we talk a lot about how kids learn and what is the best strategy to help the most Nepali kids while working within the Nepali education system. Forgive me if this post is a bit scattered, I am just putting some ideas down.
Our perspectives and attitudes towards traditional education systems vary greatly. Luke is a true auto-didact who has been coding since age five and never spent a day in university. I spent my early schooling years in special education classes, did very well in high school, and then barely graduated from university. Rabi and Saurav both did fantastically well at world-class elite universities (MIT grads). We were all quite lucky to have educated parents, go to decent schools, and had access to books and other learning materials. We grew up in resource-rich environments compared to the average Nepali. Our social interactions with educated people such as our parents and schoolmates were a critical component of our larger educations. It is easy to just focus on teachers, schools, and material resources but forget the social component.
One of the crucial challenges facing Nepal’s education system is how to provide quality education to kids in resource-poor environments: no libraries, high student-teacher ratios (50:1 and sometimes 100:1), limited school supplies, the students’ own parents are often uneducated, poorly trained teachers, etc. Forgive me for stating the obvious: OLPC itself was formed in part to address these resource deficiencies. The four of us quit our jobs and formed OLE Nepal to follow this dream.
We need to think differently about creating learning activities for resource-poor environments than we would for kids in a resource-rich environment. The best example of this that I can think of is teaching kids how to program in Squeak. There is a traininng center in Kathmandu that teaches kids how to program in Squeak and the kids’ work is quite amazing. We would love to teach kids in every classroom around Nepal how to program in Squeak. The educational benefits would be simply enormous. Unfortunately, teaching Squeak requires a highly trained and progressively-minded teacher. A true auto-didact like can teach herself Squeak. That auto-didact can also teach others, if she has interest and ability to do so.
For example, Luke taught himself Squeak in a couple weeks but the progress of Saurav and myself has been halting at best. We get bogged down quickly when we work on Squeak on our own but can move quickly with his instruction. In this case, co-teaching worked because the auto-didact also happens to be a great teacher. We had an important social resource available to us.
It is unlikely we will be able that we will deploy a trained Squeak teacher for every Nepali school in the short-term. I do think that we may be able get some teachers to teach drawing using Squeak and down the line get them teach to actual activity development. For this reason and others, we are focusing not on teaching kids how to use Squeak to build their own activities but using it as a platform to rapidly develop learning activities that fit within the existing Nepali curriculum.
Constructionist Learning activities work best when they are very
discoverable, that is, it is very easy to figure out how they work with
minimal to no outside instruction. What I am trying to get at is that what is discoverable for a kid in a resource-rich environment may not be so discoverable in a resource-poor environment.
Let me step back to another matter for a second. We are using Squeak as a platform to rapidly develop learning activities that fit within the existing Nepali curriculum. This begs the question: Why not just develop learning activities that stretch kids imaginations and problem-solving abilities? The answer is:
More on Point #1. Teachers in Nepal have scarce time to prepare their kids for grade level exams. Nepali kids have to pass grade level exams at grades 1, 3, 5, 7, and 18 . These particular grades are off the top of my head and I may not have the particular grades correct. They don’t move on to the next grade until they pass. We can create super awesome activities for the XO’s but the teachers won’t use them unless they think the activities will help their kids pass the tests. They are more likely to use the XO’s if they think they will significantly enhance their pass rates.
Our challenge is to meet the curriculum requirements and design great learning activities. The good thing is, we love challenges.