This last week I was part of a BRCK expedition team that traveled from Nairobi through the Chyulu Hills, and oversea to the small island of Pemba in the northern part of Zanzibar. On the way, we installed some of our equipment, including:

• A point-to-point link running Moja WiFi, providing free internet access for Kenya Wildlife Services rangers who protect the rhino population.
• A weather station at a lighthouse on Pemba island, running off of our PicoBRCK device.
• A special SupaBRCK running Moja, educational content in a school on Kokota island, as well as training and use of the Kio Kit at the same location.
• A SupaBRCK Moja installed at the port of Shimoni in a store near the market.

One thing I’ve learned on BRCK expeditions is that there is no “normal” experience from one to the next. This one we had to be used to water everywhere, we lost or broke two phones and severely damaged a third, all vehicles behaved themselves (miracle!), and we had the Good All Over team with us that made it feel like a reality TV show.

We do these expeditions for two primary reasons: to have a fun adventure as a team, and to test our products far out in the field.

We do have a lot of fun, you can see that in the Instagram, Twitter, and blog posts. However, a requirement is that they also be challenging, providing a certain amount of physical and mental difficulty. We plan them this way for us to test ourselves, strengthen our internal team bonds, and stress out our equipment. It works, so we keep doing it year after year.

Creative solutions come from time with users

While we were out on this trip, there was a good Economist article published that references BRCK and what we’re doing. It’s important to remember that so few companies are actually out in the field trying to find solutions for people who aren’t financially wealthy. Logically this makes sense. Unless you’re a development company or a charity organization, you have to make money and if the numbers don’t work, then they don’t work.

The ITU calculates that in poor countries the average cost in 2016 of the smallest mobile-internet package was equal to 14% of the average national income per person, putting it out of most people’s reach.

One of the benefits of the BRCK leadership team playing such a direct role in these expeditions is that we are installing, testing, fixing, and using the equipment right alongside the users of it. We’re doing the messy work, but also having to explain how our platform works to the people we’re leaving it with. This is what leads us to creative solutions for both the technical and business problems that we find. It could be a better way to waterproof our gear, or it comes in a deeper understanding of how important it is to focus on our model of FREE public WiFi as we realize that these people will not be able to pay.

Just because the companies that came before us were unable to find a way to serve the needs of the people with small incomes doesn’t mean that there isn’t a way forward. It just means that we need to be more creative. Nothing builds creativity like sweating over a connection in rural Africa with your colleagues and the users breathing down your neck. 😉

Being my first time to travel to Samburu, I found it quite exciting getting ready for the trip. We left for Kiltamani Primary School with a fellowship of five: Robert, Eduardo, Sheila, Duncan and I. The Kalama Conservancy is about 400 kilometers away from Nairobi therefore the long journey was expected.

Our windows are rolled all the way down. The breeze loosens my hijab and kisses my hair. We are listening to Tracy Chapman with the volume turned up. Every line is a message written just for us and we hum to the tune of the beat. The car sighs,it’s engine tickling with relief. We’ll have sunburn then fevers. We can’t wait to get to Kiltamany.

At Nanyuki, on our way to Kiltamany

We arrive at  the school quite late, but not late enough to set up camp. Edoardo helps Loussa and I with setting up our tents, cool house music plays in the background. As Duncan is telling stories I kick my shoes off and unfold my legs in the bare sand. I see a scorpion and put my shoes back on.

Where the scorpions are

The next day half the team set off to Korr for a day’s refresher training while we trained the new teachers at Kiltamany on how to use the Kio Kit. It was and still is a learning experience.

Lousa teaching the head teacher how to use the Broadcast feature.

After a day’s hard work we gather and tell stories and laugh. Our laughter did not build softly but exploded, filling the smoky air and spilling it out into the dark.

The next morning as we prepare to go home, I can’t help but feel honored to be part of this great experience: to enhance our education system for the better.

The car fills with wind, so pushy and loud my hair whips against my neck and I can’t hear the music anymore. I turn and look at Lousa and she is fast asleep. Edoardo is singing, Robert’s eyes glued to the road and Duncan trying to read a book.

The Aegis Graham Bell awards was established by the Aegis school of Telecom Data and Science as a tribute to the late father of Telephony, Sir Alexander Graham Bell.

The award’s mission is to recognize outstanding innovations and entrepreneurship in the fields of Telecom, Social, Mobility, Analytics, Cloud, and Security.

This year’s awards ceremony was held on Thursday 9th February 2017 at the NDMC convention centre in New Delhi.

While the rest of the winners were countries with operations in India, BRCK is the only company outside of India that won an award. BRCK’s education solution, the Kio Kit, won the top honours in the mEducation category.

Alex Masika, BRCK Biz Dev Manager, receiving the award

BRCK’s game-changing products and solutions continue to receive international acclaim for use of technologies that are literally revitalizing businesses and communities around the world.

We board flight UNO 405H at 0730 hrs from Wilson Airport and 1hr 45 mins later, we are at Kakuma Town in Turkana County. Have you ever seen photos of Turkana people? Most of the photos show a bunch of men and women, boys and girls, young and old Turkana people with short, thick and kinky hair smelling of sun. Do you know how the sun smells? Neither do I. They are usually in their best clothes which are ironically their everyday clothes.

This is not the case in Kakuma Refugee Camp. The Kakuma refugee camp is in Kakuma Town and is buzzing with activity. The camp was established in 1992 to accommodate refugees from Sudan but was later expanded to accommodate refugees from Somalia, Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda. According to the latest UNHCR statistics, the Kakuma Refugee camp hosts more than 100,000 refugees.

Janet and I are here to deploy the Kio Kit at the Amani Boys’ Centre, a boys’ rescue centre which is run by Jesuit Refugee Services (JRS). The temperatures are high. Francis, our contact in Kakuma hands us a bottle of water when we arrive and advises us to stay hydrated.

The camps where we will be spending the next two days is a fenced and secure area with nice concrete rooms and a kitchen. Soon after breakfast we leave for the Jesuit ICT centre where refugees are enrolled for ICT classes. It is an organised institution with two computer labs each with close to 20 computers. This is where we are going to train Paul, the systems administrator at the centre, and his team of 5 including Greg St. Arnold, the Regional Education Coordinator Eastern/Southern Africa.

On day two and we drive to Amani Boys’ Centre, which is 10Kms from Kakuma Town, for training. Janet introduces the Kio Kit to the boys who are between the ages of 6 years and 19. Having grown up in harsh conditions both from their home country and in the refugee camp, 70% of the boys in the centre had not interacted with a smartphone or a tablet before.

They were curious to learn and interact with the Kio Tablets which made the training easy and enjoyable and in less than an hour, the boys had learnt how to navigate on the Kio Tablet. The trainer- Felix Otieno- starts training the boys with the choice of content like Mr. Nussbaum Games.

The best thing about the sessions for the boys was that they thought they were just playing, not learning. Yet over the few days we were with them, we noticed how much more confident they became in class and also with using the device.

2016 proved to be a busy year at BRCK, after we announced our funding round. We started off by getting into our new office, upgrading from the small room we’d used for the previous two years.

There was a blur of events, with some of us speaking at WEF, TED, ITU, and many others. A number of visitors came through, the biggest being Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

We had the good fortune to win a number of awards by the year’s close as well:

• Fast Company’s 2016 Innovation by Design Awards
• Sustainia Top 100 2016
• AfricaCom: Best Pan-African Initiative 2016
• ITU: Global SME Award 2016
• African Entrepreneurship Award 2016 Finalist

The real work we do is focused on what our customers need, and we figure that out in two ways. First, we spend a lot of time with them. Second, is we do quite a bit of internal testing, as can be seen from the expedition to Mt. Kenya, testing out some new sensor connectivity products.

Some of this work is done just because it’s good to do, as Juliana and Rufus continued to support the Africa Cancer Foundation work, going all over the country to bring connectivity in their efforts to help with cancer screening.

We get very close and spend a lot of time with the people using our products. The Kio Kit, our education solution has been doing well, but we always strive to make it better. Mark, Alex and Nivi lead much of this work as they visited schools, spending time with teachers and students from Malawi to Tanzania, as well as here in Kenya with our trip to Samburu, spending 7 days with Kiltamany Primary School and working with one of our partners, Liquid Telecom to speed up their overall network (see video below).

Liquid Telecom delivers internet to pupils at remote Kenya primary school from Liquid Telecom Group on Vimeo.

Other partnerships have continued to grow. Intel has become a great partner, where we work with both their chip and education teams on multiple products and projects. The same applies to our local partners in Upande, who we’ve teamed up to do quite a bit of intense water sensor work in a county in Kenya. New partners this year include; Swissport, Illuminum Greenhouses, Norwegian Refugee Council, Close the Gap International, BookAid, and Paygo Energy.

Stuff we make

Kio Kit now in 11 countries
We started shipping the Kio Kit in the beginning of the year. After getting the kits out to a few customers in some pretty hard to reach areas, we realized we needed to harden the case to manage the rough transport that is required to get it to its destination. The hardware and software teams continued to improve both, culminating in what we feel is the best holistic education solution on the market.

Kio Kit to be used to scale up a rapid response to educational needs in emergencies. In partnership with the Norwegian Refugee Council, youth and out of school children in Dadaab refugee camp will use the Kio Kit to improve their literacy and reading skills in English and Somali.

Our customers agree. Not only have they been back for repeat orders, but we’ve shipped Kio Kits to 11 countries around the world – stretching from the Solomon Islands to Mexico, and of course here in East and Southern Africa.

BRCK v1 goes end of life
As we get ready for the next generation of BRCK hardware, we decided to stop orders on the old BRCK hardware. Since the end of 2015 the team has been pushing hard on the next generation core device, using all of the lessons we’ve learned from both the original BRCK and the Kio Kit. The new BRCK will be an enterprise-grade device, more details in the new year.

R&D – continuing the innovation cycle
It turns out that there are a number of companies across Africa who badly need an IoT solution that works in our environment. Something reliable and inexpensive that can connect information from their valuable equipment and assets to the people who make decisions.

The original BRCK box states, “connectivity for people and things”, and what we found out is that the BRCK v1 might technically be able to do some IoT work, but it wasn’t the right device for it. 2016 has seen us go through the early stages of our new PicoBRCK device, an answer to the rugged IoT needs across Africa’s enterprises. While still in development, we expect a final product in 2017.

2017: The Year Ahead

Expect two new products this year from BRCK, as mentioned above. A lot of the hard work put in by the hardware, software, and design teams in 2016 will bear fruit this year as we get to final productization and are able to scale out for customer orders. Much of the effort from the BRCK team will be spent on finalizing and shipping these products, while also supporting and growing the base for Kio Kit.

On the business side of the house, we’re ramping up our supply chain to manage the increasing demand for all products. We’ll continue to extend beyond Kenya into other interesting markets, which always includes East African countries, and many Southern African ones as well. We also have a few surprises up our sleeves which we can’t talk about in public quite yet. 🙂

A huge thank you to our partners who we’re doing so much work with, and of course our families who are such a great support in the ups-and-downs of a young company’s life. A big thanks to our friends at Ushahidi, the iHub, Gearbox and Akirachix who make life in the Nairobi tech ecosystem such a wonderful experience. My biggest thank you goes out to the BRCK team, the ones who you don’t see on stage and who sometimes clock crazy hours to solve problems, run spreadsheets, create new designs, think up new ideas, and who code, solder and respond to our customers day in and day out.

The first Kio Kit customers

Last year when we launched our ruggedised Kio Kit, what followed was a ton of interested buyers. It gave us both huge hope and nerves that our product was going to schools. Prior to launch, we had piloted the Kio Kit in some schools and that gave us a lot of user experience feedback. Now however, it was time to find buyers and ship them off to new users.  

Our first customers unexpectedly turned out to be students. International school of Kenya’s students huddled together and made the first purchase as a donation to a primary school in Nanyuki – Irura Primary School through their inter-cultural program. Irura Primary School is about 20Km from Nanyuki town and about 6Km from Ol Pejeta’s Rongai Gate. The students come from the nearby community, beyond being surrounded by an expansive wildlife conservancy, they are nested away in rural like settings.

Since our first Kio Kit deployment, we have learnt and improved many times over. From teacher training to content preparation, over time this experience gave us many learning lessons that we have certainly benefited from. Our first customers and school feel special to us, in a way we have only learnt what that means almost 1 year later.

Improvements to the Kio Kit.

Irura Primary being the first to deploy the Kio Kit has been a long process of learnt improvements. We began to learn key things such as how to better manage the content, to supporting hardware issues. There were hurdles that since then over 9 months has been significant to making improvements that are now applied on the Kio Kit.

Supporting Teachers

When we launched the Kio Kit we had some ideas of what impact it would have on both the students and the teachers, however our calculation was theoretical. We imagined it. It has been revolutionary to see how teachers benefit from using the Kio Kit. They have taught us how to make improvements, not just by making it easier for them to find content for their classes but also aiding them with lesson plans and giving them additional teaching tools to support them. Teachers love using the Kio Kit in class because it’s a helpful teaching tool. The students are able to focus better in class, they pay attention to what they are learning with ease and they don’t get distracted easily during their lesson.

Students

Schools like Irura that are away from cities and in rural towns are usually lacking in facilities and learning materials. Most students don’t have textbooks or enough of them and even finding writing materials is difficult. Without some form of technology, learning for these children would be difficult. The Kio Kit provides a great alternative to learning and beyond that gives the child a grasp of what technology looks like in this century. ISK also provides content which they share with Irura students. This content, created by ISK students helps their peers not just watch, but also understand what their peers have made in this cultural exchange.

Kids by Kids

Learning through peers is a great way to gain greater understanding of educational material. ISK students took this in an interesting approach. Their cultural exchange program got them interested in learning about the folk tales and traditional stores the students in Irura had learnt through generations. These stories were then translated, drawings and narration added to make small animations.  Today the content is available on the Kio Kit.

Many Thanks

Our trips to Irura Primary were coordinated with the help of Rift Valley Adventures. They played a big role in setting up a computer lab at Irura as well as hosting us many times when we would take the trip to Nanyuki. Endless thanks to Dipesh Pabari who didn’t tire in getting our team together with both ISK and Irura Primary.

A year on and full of hard work, looking back we learn a lot from our first deployment. These lessons and many more fuel incessant changes to move our product in the right direction.

A question we get asked often at BRCK Education is about data supporting the effectiveness of our work. Potential customers, donors and investors want to know what metrics we use and have to verify that the Kio Kit improves learning outcomes.

The truth is that the Kio Kit doesn’t have any impact on learning. The Kio Kit without education content is just really cool hardware. The metrics buck really stops with our digital content partners and teachers. Whether a school/teacher decides to use the Kio Kit to teach literacy using the Tusome, eLimu or Jolly Phonics content is what might determine the learning outcomes at that school.

The Kio Kit is not at all prescriptive in how we expect all teachers to use it in class. We believe that the Kio Kit is a toolbox with several tools inside it. Which tool is used, when it is used and how it is used should remain the decision of the person who knows the students best: their teacher. In some cases, we have curated a collection of standard content, but when we deploy Kio Kits to the Solomon Islands or Mexico, we have no say in what content the kids there will consume and interact with.

But metrics are important. It is important Kenyan primary schools talk about the KCPE results. It is important that we know literacy levels of students. They say numbers don’t lie, but we all know people who lie have used numbers. If there’s a measurable school reform intervention that worked in inner-city DC, it does not mean it will work in Samburu. This is where metis plays an important role.

It is not just children who go to the school

In Greek mythology, Metis was the personification of deep thinking, knowledge and wisdom. The Kiltamany expedition was 7 days without running water or electricity; a school in the middle of nowhere, forgotten by the government, politicians and most.

Some of the challenges we observed while we were there:

• 4 teachers and 1 headteacher were allocated by the Teacher Service Commission to this school with 8 classes.
• Teachers were from Meru, Archer’s Post, Nairobi. Most were not happy about being posted to such a remote school, far from friends, family, amenities and a social life.
• Teachers were not tied to the local people in any way.
• Teachers were often absent and sometimes drunk during class.
• Most classes we observed during our time there did not have a teacher present
• Students were also often absent. Parents viewed school (especially with such teacher absenteeism) as a waste of time – taking care of the goats was a better alternative.
• Teachers were demoralized by the absenteeism of students, especially the smart girls who were married early.
• Teachers were demoralized by their low pay and were often seen taking calls during class to “side hustle.”
• By 11am, it becomes unbearably hot, effective learning and concentration become near impossible.
• If the borehole of the village dries up, children are sent to get water for lunch from elsewhere. One day, the children waited till 4pm for lunch – for many it was the only meal they would eat.

Some of the challenges were surprising, others are pervasive everywhere in Kenya. What learning from metrics can we apply in a school like this? What we saw working in the school were some excellent instances of local knowledge and community leadership: metis.

Meet Sylvester Lengamunyak, an amazing example of metis. If anyone knows what is needed to transform Kiltamany Primary School, Sylvester does. If anyone is able to connect the dots and make those things happen, he is. If anyone is able to bring all the right stakeholders together, he is.

Sylvester (L) is also a teacher!

While were there, we saw Sylvester:

• Call a meeting of village elders, the school Board of Management and the teachers to agree on the way forward. Each group stood up and owned responsibility of what they needed to do. These agreements were written and signed by all.
• Organize for water to be fetched from Intrepids Tented Camp when the borehole was dry. He had a good relationship with the kind manager there, they also sold us some diesel and checked our tires.
• Organize for boda rides for teachers, volunteers, patients and visitors.
• Organize for 40 women to have literacy and numeracy classes 3 times a week. This involved approval of the elders, their husbands and the school for the facilities.

Deep local knowledge, empathy, passion and purpose are the things that bring people like Sylvester, content like eLimu’s and hardware like the Kio Kit together. It takes a village to gather their collective strengths and knowledge, to strategize and work together to build a culture of genuine teaching and learning.

L-R: Sylvester, Nivi, Edoardo. An important lesson from Samburu: the best herders are at the rear of their flock.

Recommended reading: “Metis and the Metrics of Success” by Ernesto J. Cortes Jr.

We started early in the morning on the third day at Kiltamany and we were all late. As soon as we arrived at school, we started the meeting with the teachers and tried to get a picture of their challenges: what you do like, why you decided to be a teacher, what you don’t like, what are the problems you see.

After few hours we had a meeting with both the community council and the teachers: everything was entirely in Swahili and Samburu language, so I had hard time understanding what they were speaking about most of the time (my Swahili is far from good), but thanks to the patience of my colleagues, I managed to understand everything eventually.

Most of the discussion was almost a fight between community and teachers: each of one of them argued about the role and the other’s responsibilities because of the poor performance of their pupils and children. Long story short, we discovered that according to culture your child either goes to school and performs well, or there’s no need for the child to be in school, so he or she starts working very early in their childhood.

If their children don’t go to school, they will obviously perform badly. The teachers are not engaged because pupils perform badly, if they don’t attend class. If teachers perform badly, then the pupils can’t get a good education and, again, they will perform badly at KCPE.  Here is the loop you can’t escape, unless everybody takes responsibility.

After few hours of discussion, we all agreed to write a list of things that have to be changed and what each of the actors (parents, teachers, community, government) has to do. This was the most difficult (but interesting) part of the day, because it is beyond technology.

You listen, you understand, you write a list of things together with all the stakeholders: the community, the parents and the teachers. You compromise and you build an initial framework you can use to make things work. There’s no technology involved, neither is there a product built. From this point you start to think how technology can improve and make things happen efficiently and faster.

What we realized eventually was the lack of framework that particular school has and the possible downsides of a product like the Kio Kit. If you deploy where there’s no framework, you need to build one together with the community before even thinking about starting a real pilot or thinking about making a difference. This was the most difficult part of the expedition: how can you convince the community to keep their children in the school? How can parents be sure that their children are not wasting time on a poor  (and so useless for them) education?

These two questions made us start thinking how we can improve the user experience and the capacity of our Kio Kit to include what some parents want from the education of their children and how we can better track the results of the pupils learning, eventually sharing those with the parents themselves.  We want to build a product that can adapt to every kind of situation, even when there’s no framework supporting the education system.

In technology projects you must not try to change your customer behaviors, not at the beginning at least, but you must try to properly understand your target before you design the product you want to build. Don’t just think about it, understand it, then design it, then test it and re-design if you haven’t included something. We never thought about an environment like this before, where, for example, the Kio Kit can be shared across multiple classes at the same time or it can be used with an autopilot system because of lack of teachers.

Kiltamany is composed of 10 villages surrounding the Samburu National Park. They are far away from the city, in some kind of deserted landscape, with no piped water and no electricity. Kiltamany Primary School is the only school for the whole community, with around 200 students, scarce chalk and studying materials. Sylvester, a Samburu Junaenda (in his 30s) believes the school is the hope to Samburu people live their lives better, change the way the community think about marrying early age girls and their practice of genital mutilation. In all, offer future generation broader possibilities.

In the Expedition BRCK Team came to Samburu, it was a week of a thousand learnings. I was there just for the last 3 days, and it was already special: feet on the ground, thoughts on the rising possibilities, hope for the future, hands-on, lots of work to be done.

For the three days I was in Kiltamany, there were only 3 out of the 7 teachers present. The School has 8 classes, meaning that on a normal day there is always one class without teacher, and during our time there 5 of the classrooms had no teacher. In spite this, children came every day and were seated in their desks, eager to learn something. Some of them reading or writing, or just doing nothing, until the bell for break ring.

This gave our BRCK team an extra job as we were taking turns to be teachers. It was good in one sense, as it put us in the shoes of the teachers (not exactly of course, as I do not have the training nor the content nor speak their languages). I felt the difference of giving one class with the kids holding the Kio Tablets, and another class with no such resources. On the other hand, it was not ideal, as it was important to see how the teachers behave with the tablets, if they find it useful, handy, and simple and if it helps in class.

Gordon, from eLimu, was showing the kids their new Swahili literacy app, Hadithi! Hadithi!. Bobo, the app character, was created to do a lot of success among the kids. He tells them story, ask them questions, say enthusiastically his Well done!!!  The kids, on the other side, were sited on their desks trying very curiously to get near Bobo, as he was in Gordon’s laptop (as the app is still not in the tablets).  They were very excited to participate. Each time one kid went to interact with the screen was the most amazing part. There was a suspense in the air about knowing what response Bobo would give.

I went to teach in Class 4 without the tablets and it was a hard job. First my absence of Swahili and the kids’ English. I used a lot of body language and made them come to the board to draw some animals they could see around. They drew lions, sheep, goats, elephants, cows, camels, and snakes. Then, I moved to the body parts vocabulary: heads, shoulders knees and toes. They showed to me that they were learning, and that they knew all the words. However, when I asked some other types of questions, the only possible answer could be YES! YES! YES! They didn’t want to get me sad.

When in class 5, now with the Tablets, it was was amazingly simpler. In this class, the children were calling me all the time to teach them something, and they were really excited to get a mzungu teacher. Their English was a lot better so I decided to read with them some English Story Books from the app. Each of them read one paragraph, just as I did in school. I made some questions about the story and asked them to draw what they remembered.

What I saw the teachers normally doing, is ask the students to repeat the words in the story. They can do this well. That’s the way the teachers usually gets feedback if the kids are learning or not. It’s definitely a harder job to check their comprehension of what was said or read, or if they can put it in other words, but to develop this skill is the first step to build a critical mind. I suppose once there is this feature on the app, with proposed questions for each exercise, or the possibility of the teacher to develop their own questions, students will learn better and teacher will find their job easier.

During this expedition, I realized something I already knew but wanted some proof. The impact the Kio Kits are bringing to this community is hard to be measured, but is huge. All the content inside one small tablet, the opening of possibilities in the children’s minds, interactivity, learning by playing games, curiosity, all this with no connectivity needed. Each time, we are learn of our capability to improve society.

On a chilly but warm Monday morning of June 20th 2016, Rene John Dierkx and I embarked on a 4 hour road trip from Lilongwe to Blantyre to deploy a Kio Kit purchased for Noacha Full Primary school by UNICEF.

Rene is an Education specialist and Architect at UNICEF who has worked in Africa for many years. As we chatted away during our journey I was amazed by the well maintained tarmacked roads, the warmness of the country and the lack of crazy traffic on a Monday morning! To me, Malawi was living up to its nickname – the warm heart of Africa.

Malawi is a landlocked country in the Southern African region and is among the world’s least developed countries. About 85% of the population lives in rural areas and the economy is driven by agriculture.

At around noon, we arrived at Noacha Primary School which is located in the outskirts of Blantyre. The school has over 5000 primary school pupils. Although the school has about 90 teachers, it does not have enough classrooms and learning resources. Each class has an average of about 100 students and there is a severe shortage of textbooks, exercise books, and even furniture leading to some classes being held out in the open.

Rene, being an architect, is monitoring a pavilion for the school which will serve as a learning and social resource centre. He has initiated a project called Living Schools that seeks to empower children to become thinkers, designers, and makers. Through this initiative, the school has implemented some fantastic projects such as tree planting and helping out in the construction of the pavilion. These activities will enable the children to reach their full potential, and I’m proud that the Kio Kit is a part of the project as a learning resource.

When we arrived at the school, we found the morning teachers winding up their shifts. About 10 teachers agreed to remain behind so that we can train them on the Kio Kit – our fully integrated education solution that turns every classroom into a digital classroom.

The reaction was amazing! The teachers were all excited. All the hunger pangs were gone and we ended up having a full afternoon training session. Due to time, we agreed that we’d continue the training the next day to include the other teachers as well as utilize the Kio Kit to teach a class.

On day two, teacher Gertrude was well prepared to teach her class 6 class science. Her topic for the day was living plants and with my help we selected appropriate topics from the Kio Kit. She selected a topic on plants from eLimu and was very excited that it had the exact illustrations and explanations that she had in mind.

In class she introduced the topic using chalk and a blackboard and then gave step by step instructions to the class on how to find the topic in the tablets. Due to the large number of students, they had to sit in groups of 4.

After about 10 minutes of working in groups, the picture below speaks a thousand words on what happened when she asked questions. Everyone raised their hands ready to answer questions. The only other resource that she had apart from the chalk and blackboard was the Kio Kit.

After class, some of the feedback I got from the students were, “it makes learning fun, I understood the subject more” etc.

Feedback from the teachers were, “it made teaching easy and fun, they were happy that they were the first school in the region to access digital technology, it helped them solve the issue of lack of textbooks” etc.

At BRCK, we do not just create technology but we design and engineer solutions that make a positive impact in the society we live in. Over 400 million children around the world do not have access to basic education. Our vision is to enable millions of children in schools across emerging markets to access digital education tools for better learning. Schools like Noacha and partners like UNICEF only help us reiterate our mission of providing quality education to all children around the world.