Agavi: Brazilian Forest Schools Digitalization

Greetings all,

I hope the new year finds you well.  Our coding club students have continued their learning and prototyping and we'll continue this work into the upcoming year.  Unfortunately, we were not able to make our way up to the Amazon due to logistical difficulties, but we'll be trying again later this year.

Moving forward, we've decided to adjust the project slightly.  A similar forest community is closer to Campinas, where a lot of our students live and work and so we'll work on demonstrating and testing our prototypes in the nearby community of Guapiruvu over the first half of the year.  Once we have proof of concept of our classrooms-in-a-box, we'll work on expanding it to more remote communities in Brazil as well as importing the concept to our Ukrainian colleagues, who have a desperate need for offline learning at the moment.

With gratitude,

Lev

Greetings all,

I have been in Brazil for seven months now and it's been quite the adjustment.  During this period, I've had a chance to establish a lot of starter projects through my colleagues at the University of Campinas and am becoming increasingly familiar with the educational system here and how the work Science Voices does can fit well.  Things are progressing slowly but surely.  Most of the work has been in establishing connections and building a network that can support our work for multiple years.  Currently, I'm planning a site visit to our Amazonian River school partners in December, so stay tuned for more soon!

With gratitude,

Lev

Greetings all,

It's been a few months since my arrival in Brazil, but I'm settling in quite nicely.  With colleagues here, we've completed some public outreach work in Guapiruvu, an agroforestry community that my colleagues use as a model for more difficult forest teaching environments elsewhere in the country.  This vibrant community is a few hours to the west of Campinas, where we're currently working with students to train them in coding and electronics prototyping.  Our aim is that during the winter and upcoming spring semester, we'll be able to prototype and test the digital lab kits here in Campinas and Guapiruvu before taking them up to the Amazon River basin at the end of the year.

We have enough funding to prototype the project and construct a few kits, but further assistance can help us go further, so please tell your friends about this project.  We're hoping to fund a few of the students who are working to design and build the kits to come with us to Parintins to supervise the initial deployments and gain valuable field experience.

With gratitude,

Lev

Greetings friends,

I'm happy to say that I have arrived in Brazil so that we can begin in-person work on this project.  I'll be working with colleagues and students at the University of Campinas in Campinas, Brazil, over the next few months to develop the digital lab-in-a-box concept.  We're also planning on a scouting expedition in April to Parintins in the Amazon River Basin where we'll be implementing the project, with on-location work planned for August/September.

This project is of special importance because it is our first on-location work since the beginning of the pandemic (March 2020).  Additionally, this project cross-pollinates with our Ukraine project, which works on modernizing the Ukrainian classroom through technologies and approaches we'll be refining here in Brazil for even more challenging classrooms.  Our sincere hope is that success here in Brazil will allow us to implement a version of this project in Ukraine as well in the coming months to allow educators to work around massive infrastructure destruction as a result of unjustifiable aggression and carnage.

As always, thank you for your generous contributions and I look forward to bringing you additional field updates over the coming months.

With gratitude,

Lev