Technology in Taru

Although on a Kenya Keys trip, many activities are done as a group, each volunteer who goes to Kenya has an area of focus.  No surprise that George's focus is technology!

 One of his primary responsibilities is to help with the laptop program.  Sponsors and others donors will provide money to purchase laptops for college and university students.  For the first years of this program,  the engineering, math and science students were most in need of technology.  That has changed and every post-secondary student could benefit from their own laptop.  Working with his contacts at HP, George purchases laptops, sets them up with current software, gets them to team members going to Kenya and coordinates all this with Kabani on the Kenyan staff who then distributes the laptops to happy young students like these. 

Can you imagine what a game changer this is for a busy university student?

On this trip George also taught a class on the internet to secondary school students.  Unfortunately we were always busy doing something else while he taught so I didn't get a good photo of his 'human internet'.  

I'll let him explain in his own words what he did.  It was very clever and totally interactive so I am sure the kids were enthralled.  So often in Kenya the teaching is all by lecture preparing them for the rote learning necessary to score well on a test.  They LOVE interactive activities!

Exercise:  ‘human’ internet simulation

Introduce the internet as a very large set of computers that communicate with each other.  It really started with 4 computers at 4 different locations, all run by computer specialists.  As they explored what a computer could do in combination with other computers, they developed two fundamental capabilities necessary for sharing the computing load:

1. The ability for computers to share information with each other via a ‘network’ of communication links, and
2. The ability to select which computer to communicate with by assigning an ‘address’ to a computer, much like a postal address.

With these two functions, the internet could grow from the original 4 computers to the millions of connected computers today.

Exercise:  Have the students act as computers to show how the internet works.

1. Select one student to be the Internet Service Provider (ISP) required to connect to the rest of the internet.  In Kenya, this is usually a company called Safaricom.   This student will handle all requests we are going to make, and they hold a sign saying Safaricom.
2. Select several students to be the information servers.  They would specialize in various knowledge areas, like Sports, General Information, Schools, etc.   These students hold color-coded signs showing their knowledge area.
3. Select more students to be the computers forming the path between Safaricom and the information servers.  One student in the path will have a color-coded sign to match the information server.  Depending on the class size, we had 2-4 students in each path.

All of these students were brought to the front of the class, and arranged so that the ISP was in front, the servers were in the back, and the students in the path were lined up between the ISP and the server.

Now the fun begins in showing how the internet works.  I had printed a set of color-coded cards with questions about the knowledge areas.  There was also a corresponding set of cards with the same questions, but with the answer on the back.  The cards with answers were given to the information servers.  Then I had other students volunteer to “ask the internet a question’.  They came to the front, read the question, and handed the card to the Safaricom student.  Safaricom then had to identify the path to the correct server (by matching the color of the card) and hand off the card to the student acting as the path.  They then passed it down the line of students until it reached the information server.  The server found the corresponding card with the answer and passed it back along the path to Safaricom, who handed the answer to the student asking the question.  That showed the basic operation of the internet.

A couple of times, the server started to read the answer out loud and I had to remind them that they might be 1000 km away from the student asking the question, and that they had to pass the answer through the internet back to Safaricom, who would then communicate with the questioner.   And since most students were familiar with cell phones, reminding them that asking a question through Safaricom was just like what they were already doing with their phones.   It was also fun to see them get faster in running the internet as they got familiar with how it worked.

Questions included things like:

• What is the temperature in Nairobi?
• Who won the Women’s World Cup?
• Translate a Swahili phrase into English
• What is the phone number for the Girls School?
• When did Kenya Keys start?
• What was the most common topic searched last year by Kenyan students?

I closed with an overview of all the types of services the internet supports, like email, knowledge searching, websites, along with guidelines for staying safe when using the internet.

George taught this class 6 times, 2 times each at 3 different secondary school. 

The other area where George's expertise proved invaluable was in technology discussions for the new building which should be finished sometime next year.  There is a lot of technology  to discuss because there is both an E-learning center (which eventually will have 50 laptops) and a huge library that will be managed by a software program.  

The Kenya Keys Community Education Center will be the largest building in the area.  The 2nd story should be added very soon. So excited!