One Laptop Per Child comes to South Africa

CoZa Cares is delighted to be working closely with the new One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) South Africa Foundation as its implementation partner in South Africa. A number of pilot projects are planned for 2013, and as part of our own preparation, we organised a three-day training session at Kingsmead College in Rosebank, Johannesburg from 10 to 12 December.

As part of our mission to share knowledge as openly as possible, we invited stakeholders involved in ICT in Education to join us for the training, including the Department of Basic Education (DBE), the Sci-Bono Discovery Centre, Bridge, and the Kliptown Youth Program, who are already using OLPC’s XO laptops in their aftercare programme.

Also present at the event were two award-winning school principals from Limpopo, Phuti Ragophala and Mmipe Mokgehle. Both their schools form part of the Mankweng Cluster, which is the proposed area for the OLPC SA pilot programme.

One Laptop Per Child

The three-day event was originally designed to be five days long, but was compressed to fit the schedules of stakeholders. It was run by two members of the Rwandan OLPC programme, Desire Rwagaju and Jimmy Intwali, and supervised by OLPC’s Vice-President of Operations and Africa, Sergio Romero. Both Rwagaju and Intwali are based at the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology.

The first day of the event was dedicated to giving an overview of what OLPC is and does (locally and worldwide), the focus on teacher practice and its impact on learning, and the journey from traditional to 21st century teaching methodology. Trainees were also introduced to the XO laptop and the Sugar Operating System that runs on it.

The second day covered the Sugar learning environment, looking at teaching principles and methodology, the OLPC deployment guide and logistics.

The third and final day had the trainees getting to grips with the technical side of the XO laptop during a hands-on workshop covering XO assembling and dissembling, installation and configuration, maintenance and repair; with trainees getting to dismantle and reassemble the laptops.

OLPC in Rwanda

The event was very well-attended and all the trainees present expressed their excitement about the XO and an extreme desire to get OLPC implemented in South Africa.

Rwagaju handled the majority of the first day’s presentation with assistance from Intwali and Romero, illustrating his presentation with several different models of the OLPC XO laptop. Rwagaju’s presentation can be simply summarised in the video below, which is the first part of OLPC’s marketing video. According to Rwagaju:

We only ever need to play this video to governments once and they buy into our project.”

Rwagaju also spoke about the OLPC project in his homeland. Rwanda’s deployment began in 2007, supported by G1G1 donations and by President Paul Kagame’s vision for the country that included universal access to the Web. In 2008 the XO was introduced to the first 10,000 students.Rwanda currently has the highest deployment level in Africa with around 210 000 laptops distributed to schoolchildren across the nation. They estimate that they will have full nationwide saturation by 2017.

Besides Rwanda, OLPC is in 44 different countries on 6 continents. OLPC’s mission is to empower the world’s poorest children through education:

We aim to provide each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop. To this end, we have designed hardware, content and software for collaborative, joyful, and self-empowered learning. With access to this type of tool, children are engaged in their own education, and learn, share, and create together. They become connected to each other, to the world and to a brighter future.”