Jakub’s Notes: October Trainings at Taita-Taveta Schools
I came to Kenya on 7 October to volunteer on our project of Slovak-Kenyan Cooperation for Modern Schools until mid-December. I replaced Ivana Ulicna, who spent almost 6 months in Kenya this year, did a great job helping training companies and got employed at Pontis Foundation in September, where we exchanged our positions. I was in Kenya many times before, but this trip will be much longer. Let me share a few memories and ideas from the last month.
The ICT Clubs meeting in Chala
On the weekend of 11-12 October selected ICT Club members from ten schools held a workshop at Chala Secondary where they exchanged best practices of their training companies. In a way, I came right to witness what was I think the highlight of the last month, as I watched students present the progress of their training companies in terms of marketing and financial documents, products and trading between the schools.
For two days students and teachers took turns to give presentations on various subjects: among others, we had a simulation of job interview with a feedback for the participants; learnt how to do a skype video conference; produce brochures and invoices; and use the internet tools of Practice Enterprise Network. On Saturday evening we went down and up the steep hillside of Lake Chala and saw the sunset and took many photos by the water. Originally, with our colleague Gift, we wanted to present the students at the workshop a Lego Mindstorms robot that I brought as the second kit from Slovakia. The first Lego robotic construction set we donated to Kajire Secondary, because their two training companies had the best promotional videos. Now we wanted to motivate other students to join the ICT Club next year, as we want to focus more also on technical skills development. For the lack of time we decided to make a separate Saturday workshop between Kajire Girls and Mwambiti Boys and learn how to construct the robot at Kajire on 18 October.
Mentoring training companies and presenting Lego Mindstorms
Gift Mtambo is the soteICT administrator that started to work with us in May. And now in October we toured around nine out of ten schools that participate in the soteICT project and mentored the soteICT Clubs on proper business documentation and also showed two types of Lego robots. Gift assembled the first robot, Track3r, in his free time and we presented it at Kajire ICT Club on Wednesday 15 October, before the Saturday workshop. During the weekend meeting between two schools we used a second Lego kit, and created the Track3r again and also a Banner Print3r. We came again to Kajire on Monday to finish the Banner Print3r, as it was harder and slower to assemble than Track3r. But we managed to get the construction right, just the paper and marker type we had wasn’t ideal. We were able to demonstrate the Print3r but it wasn’t writing the right letters. Later we found a YouTube video that showed us where we had a problem. It was great to observe girl and boy students from the two schools to cooperate and learn how to construct something new and exciting. We didn’t get to the active programming of the robots, only tested various sample programs and used a remote control for the Track3r. This is challenge for the next year, but we are proud that now we kick-started the use of Arduino Starter Kit by Mwambiti before summer and now the use of Lego Minstorms by Kajire.
After the workshop between Kajire and Mwambiti we showed the Lego robot at six other high schools and explained the planned activities of the ICT Clubs for the next school year starting from January. Besides the trade faire of training companies and gradual improvement of their operations we want to focus on getting better at Arduino, Raspberry Pi and Lego Mindstorms constructions and programming and have a regular meetings for graduates at the soteICT Centre at Voi, that we plan to open at the beginning of the next year. This will be a big step forward and our dream comes through. But even this year many great things happened and we saw a clear progress during the student competitions, regular ICT Club meetings and also our joint workshop in Chala. Some training companies have almost professional looking products, brochures with price lists and other documents, system of archiving them and also demonstrated a real-like business cases.
