Toys from Trash
Mar 8, 2009 Education, Innovation, Innovators
Photo and quotes from Toy Story Times of India story
Some people talk about trying to change the world, then there are people like Arvind Gupta who have spend the last 30 years doing so. A graduate of IIT, Gupta left a promising career as a Telco engineer, to teach science. After seeing expensive UNICEF science kits left unopened, for fear of being damaged, Gupta realized that teachers needed to be able to make things themselves to be able to teach well. Ascribing to a view point that, “Science is not hardware, it is a viewpoint,” he began to create “toys” from everyday items, often trash, to teach children scientific concepts with the underlying belief that a more expensive education does not necessarily translate into a better one. Gupta and his team at the Children’s Science Centre at the University of Pune’s amazing work can be found on the incredible Toys from Trash website.
When I see project’s like the simple electric motor, I can’t help but wonder how many more William Kamkwamba’s we would we have if teachers had access to Gupta “toys” in rural African schools.
When not designing new toys, Gupta also translates books into Hindi (100+ books!) which he posts for free on his website. I need to file Arvind Gupta in the back of my mind for the next time I am feeling lazy!
Offline Wikipedias
Offline wikipedias represent an important source for information for places that have no/unreliable/expensive or censored Internet. I would like to highlight two projects that I have experience with.
SOS School Wikipedia
SOS Children’s Villages recently released an updated SOS 2008/2009 version of its kid safe, “hand checked” English Wikipedia version aimed at school children with selections based around the UK National Curriculum. This version is 3.5GB big and contains 5,500 articles which is about the size of a 20 volume encyclopedia consisting of about 20 million words and 34,000 images (big selling point for kids). The earlier version was distributed widely by the Shuttleworth foundation in South Africa and the through SOS’s large network of schools worldwide (192 schools & 91,000 students).
The SOS version comes in the form of static html so it can be easily run off a DVD or USB key on any computer. Content is organized by subject and with a handy title word index that does a good job replacing search functionality.
The SOS School Wikipedia 2008/2009 version can be downloaded for free here as a torrent.
Moulin Wiki
Moulin Wiki was a project that came out of the Geekcorps Mali program during my time there, the brain child of Renaud Gaudin and Frederic Renet. At that time, we weren’t able to find a suitable offline wikipedia version so we saught to create it.
Moulin Wiki is a desktop application based on Mozilla’s XULRunner and can run on windows, osx and linux. Unlike a selected version, our goal was make available the entire Wikipedia text, indexed and searchable. We were unable, however, to include images due to both licensing and size constraints.
Since our target market were people living in Mali, we released a French 550MB CDROM version containing 500K+ articles which we distributed across the country through our partners and Peace Corps Volunteers. Internews then sponsored the creation of a Farsi version which they distributed over 2,000 copies to journalists, universities and individuals in Iran.
Moulin is currently available in French, Arabic, Farsi and Vietnamese with an English version still in the works.
Zipedia
Zipedia is a Firefox extension that is able to read a Wikipedia dump to provide offline access. I really like the concept of being able to update your content by downloading new dumps (in any language). One of problems with this approach, however, is since there is no indexing is the user experience is not very zippy.
Ethiopian School Art
Dec 16, 2008 Africa, Education, Ethiopia, Innovation, Travel
I have seen many primary schools now in Africa and I was blown away by the primary schools I saw in Tigray in Northern, Ethiopia. In a very resource limited environment, these schools have turned to using paintings on all available school walls (both inside and outside of the classroom) as a teaching tool. In the Ethiopian school system, each school has a small pedagogical center and a teacher assigned to it. One of this person’s roles is to help oversee the development of these paintings. I think these are wonderful and changes the learning environment. I wish my school looked like this as a kid. It would be great to see more schools across Africa use a little paint to help overcome some of their challenging resource constraints.
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