The pilot project aim is to build two Raspberry Pi computer labs into two government schools, one of the schools will be solar-powered and the other one will use electricity.
We are collaborating with the Ministry of Education, Cambodian English learning startup Edemy, and two government schools in Cambodia. These schools are Toul Prasat Sen Sok and Chuos Lower secondary school. An advantage of this is that we can compare the results between the different power sources and quality of education, to show our partners that the project could work with two different sources with ease. So this exploration was build since last year and now we are continuing on the computer labs that we had implement.
After implementation, our team decided to visit the Chous school once again before they would resume in November 2018. We went over the curriculum schedule, the teacher’s teaching strategy, and the school’s budgeting for maintenance. We also made some observations and noticed that there were some broken mice and keyboards as well as growing fungi on the Pi cases. Furthermore, our team encountered some challenges related to the screens, video player for FreeCAD tutorials, and the cables that were invaded by rats. Due to all of these issues, we started to consider having plastic bags to cover all equipment, setting up a cleaning schedule, buying mouse traps, and purchasing mousepads.
Our team had arranged a visit to the Toul Prasat Sen Sok school on September 18th in order to make updates and prepare for the start of the next school year in November. We checked to see if there were any technical problems or broken equipment to replace during the observation. In summation, there were four missing headphones and one of the desktops keeps turning off every 10 minutes. We were also surprised to see lots of dust in the room which sooner or later would impact our technical devices. By the end of our visit, we got to talk with the school director. The school director suggested us to open up this opportunity to other students who are interested in learning English and computer. He thought that since we were having some problems with student attendance and since the students did very poorly on their grade 9 official test, it would make more sense to give this opportunity to those who value it more. If we’re going to use this idea, additional pre-tests will be required at the beginning of next school year.
