Education Tanzania, United Republic of Project #21844

Transforming Tanzanian schools with Technology

Project Report | Sep 25, 2017
Global Learning X Prize in Tanzania

By Janet Chapman | Project Leader

Kagera students

We are very excited by the announcement this month of the finalists in the global learning XPRIZE competition, having been involved since the start 2 years ago. We were delighted that our good friends One Billion made it through, as we have seen the impact of their apps to teach early numeracy and literacy in our projects. We are now going to pilot software from the other finalists too, and will keep you posted. You can read more about the competition here.

In areas like rural Tanzania, access to hardware continues to be a huge limiting factor which is why your donation is so appreciated.

We are also working with Kolibri with their offline device, particularly to promote maths and science learning.

I will be back in Tanzania in December to organise training for all our local partners to develop their use of e-learning, and also to train people in our mapping project.

Many thanks for your generosity.

Janet

Ikimba students

Mara students

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Jul 26, 2017
Fw: Report for Tanzania Development Trust Technology project 21844

By Janet CHAPMAN | Project Leader

Mar 29, 2017
RACHEL to the rescue!

By Janet Chapman | Project Leader

Studying Maths at Ndala school

Maths performance is low across Tanzania for many reasons – many schools do not have any qualified maths teachers and instead rely on temporary untrained school leavers to teach classes. As they have often themselves missed out on a good education, the cycle of poor performance goes on. Low maths performance pulls down students overall results and ruins their chances of progression to the next academic level.

Digital learning offers huge potential to raise the attainment of these students. We have so far put in small, battery operated Raspberry Pi computers with an enormous range of downloaded content on into 10 schools. This content is called RACHEL – Remote Area Community Hotspot for Education and Learning – and enables students without the internet to access world class educational materials such as Wikipedia, Khan Academy, TED talks and much more.

We have set up a project whereby each school sets up a digital group of students who use the RACHEL maths resources three times a week, and a control group that uses books only. They are tested at the start of the programme and after 6 months, then the groups change over. We will be analysing the results carefully to measure the impact of these resources.

We have only managed to fund a very small number of devices for the students to access the resources on so far, but these are supplemented by the use of teachers’ own laptops and smartphones. Students share 1 device between 4 or 5 students.

However it is already clear that students and teachers love the new resources. Grace, 15, says “I used to struggle with quadratic equations and never understand them, but after watching these videos it finally makes sense! Now I am confident I can pass my exam and become a doctor”. Mr Mahenge, her temporary teacher adds “many students were not motivated by maths and had given up. Having the pi computer has made them like maths much more and now they are working hard. God willing now they will succeed and we thank everyone who has contributed to this project.

Learning on a phone

Starting young..

Checking maths at Tunamkumbuka

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