Making A Difference: OLPC Laptops, Solar Power, & Wireless Internet in Kenya

Have UCC students figured out a viable, sustainable and duplicatable model for Internet delivery at schools in the developing world? Watch this video and find out!

In March, four UCC students (Derek Chan, Amal Chandaria, Connor Cimowsky and Adam Gordon) and their teacher, Mark Battley, traveled to the Ntugi Day Secondary School in Kenya to test an innovative way of bringing laptops and the Internet to a school with no power and no previous experience with computers.

The boys' groundbreaking idea was to use a combination of durable OLPC laptops, local cell-phone SIM cards, portable wireless routers, and solar panels in order to bring the Internet to Ntugi. You can read about their implementation in these two http://olpcnews.com posts:
http://tinyurl.com/ntugione
and
http://tinyurl.com/ntugitwo.

This video, made by two of the four participants, Amal Chandaria and Connor Cimowsky, documents both their struggles and their successes. Amal and Connor are both film students at UCC.

The video won the National Middle School Association's Video Contest and, in November 2009, will be shown as the closing video for the NMSA's annual conference. The theme of the conference is "Making A World of Difference":
http://www.nmsa.org/annual/

The project participants would like to thank One Laptop Per Child, the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, CradlePoint Technology, Tekkeon and Safaricom — our partners in the search for a viable and easily replicated solution to use portable 3G wireless, durable laptops and renewable power to provide Internet access to students around the globe.

To visit and follow the Ntugi Day Secondary School, go here:
http://ntugi.blogspot.com/
or here
https://twitter.com/ntugischool

Category:

Education

Tags:

• upper canada college
• ucc
• video
• laptops
• NMSA
• kenya
• lewa
• cradlepoint
• safaricom
• olpc
• ntugi
• yt:quality=high
• solar
• power
• ict

[sooperpenguin]

@drascalov Haters gunna hate

[deeprunner85]

wow

[drascalov]

$43,274,134 to spend, and they get among the worst netbooks available to people who are dieing of hunger, HIV/AIDS, civil war. What if this money ($100,000?) was better invested to buy 100 orphans a plane ticket to Canada where they have a better chance of a better future.

[dbgforsyth]

Wonderful initiative! What a meaningful experience it must have been for the students to break through the psychological barriers to embracing technology... keep up the great work!

[IXBhangXI]

I got an idea... lets spend millions of dollars to give Africans exactly what they need... computers.

Let's forget that most the nation is starving, war torn and in dire need of medicine. But surfing the internet is so much more noble than saving lives...

Why not do something useful for people instead of giving money mongers another avenue for enslavement.

Stoopid.

[BeeRich33]

Obviously Scaddings boys! Well done guys.

[acurrie]

If you continue on noble endeavors like this I would be inclined to agree : )