A year ago, I coined a phrase that grounded my passion for human centered design and is the reason I wake up every morning. “Africa cannot afford un-contextualized design, the stakes are simply too high” never is this so true than in education.

One of the reasons I joined and love BRCK is because BRCK dares to go where others won’t. This week we’re in northern Kenya, a remote place with many challenges. Many don’t go to these extreme environments because of the geographical, social and economic constraints. However, we at BRCK hold a different point of view, that they matter and it makes both social and economic sense to design for the real Africa.

Mark Kamau taking quick notes as the teachers learn the Kio Kit

Tirrim Primary School is a good example. It is school in the desert, a long way up from Isiolo town, and has been the top primary school in testing in Marsabit County since 2008 sending their graduates to the most prestigious schools in the country. It is a charity school paid for by missionaries and has 620 pupils. Their dream, according to one of the teachers, is to become the “RVA (Erik’s former school) of the desert.” It is a lofty and worthy goal, especially considering people of Korr think on themselves as ‘Kenya B’ because of the sense of isolation and neglect of this desert folk feel from the rest of the country. Despite their limited access, these kids are expected to sit the same national exam and pitted against the same yardstick tablet wielding, smartphone trending students in Nairobi.

As a human centered designer with a passion for Africa, this is amazing territory. The Kio Kit sets out to answer a fundamental design question. ‘How can we convert any rural classroom into a digital classroom?’

In tackling this difficult challenge we made some assumption and learnt some lessons these are specific to this expedition.

1. CONTEXTUALIZED GUIDES

We set out to create guides for using the Kio Kit is English as it is the national language upon which all examinations are taken, but the role of local language in education, even when explaining technology is simply too effective to ignore. Today I observed a nuanced but interesting example. One teacher was trying to explain to a class of lower primary kids what the back button was on the tablet using conventional English and it took him a while to get them on board. Another said please click the “Khonjor” and all the students understood it immediately.

Some Rendille children on the Kio tablets

In the Rendille language Khonjor is a sickle, one the kids grow seeing their parents use for cutting plants. This shape allowed them to understand the reference as the blade points “back”. I also observed that even a few miles apart, the nuanced pronunciation of the same word meant the difference in understanding of things. While it is means more work, we have to contextualize the Kio Kit guides in localized videos.

2. COLLABORATIVE EXPERIENCES

With tablets, the idea is that students each get a tablet and are able to access content individually. In this construct, it is easy to diminish the importance of collaborative learning. The younger students are, the more they learn from observing and collaborating with each other. The content and games on the Kio Kit that we tested emphasized the need to have even more experiences in the Kio Kit that take advantage of this collaboration.

A teacher with the Kio tablet

2. AUTHORITY CHALLENGE

The typical construct of a normal Kenyan school is that the teacher has the authority, they dictate what happens in the classroom and assume leadership, responsibility and authority. The tablet presents a different paradigm because with the tablet in their hands, the students have more responsibility than listening and writing. They play a more active role in their own learning. Handling this shift is challenging to teachers and their usual classroom control skills don’t directly apply. We therefore need to invest more time on classroom management training with technology.

There are many more lessons we have learnt from technical centered challenges to human centered challenges that energize us as we ride back home to make the Kio Kit work even better. Most of all, interacting with people motivates us to want to do even better.

Yesterday, while staying with the Samburu near Kalama, I had the opportunity to ride into Archer’s Post with my new Samburu friend Mike. Mike has the distinction of being the seconds tallest Samburu and his size brings with it an equally warm disposition. We loaded in the Land Rover – with an old man from the village who just tagged along for a free ride to do his shopping – and headed across the sandy track that meanders some 20km back to the tarmac.

Tall Mike and myself with the village kids

As we bounced along I turned up the radio and Mr. Marley was singing about “One Love”. Mike asked me if I liked reggae, which I quickly confirmed. I asked him the same question and he said he did, particularly Alpha Blondy. I was shocked that he even knew who Alpha Blondy is and so I quickly switched to my Alpha collection. For those of you who don’t know Alpha Blondy – and it would seem that I have grossly underestimated his popularity – he is a reggae artist from Cote d’Ivoire. Having spent 4 years in Cote d’Ivoire for secondary school had given me a huge appreciation for Alpha Blondy and The Solar System. This was the local music of my youth and something that I and my friends hold dearly to as part of our heritage.

Here I was driving through a land that is completely unlike the terrain of West Africa listening the singing of ja man from a Mande tribe that is nothing like the Nilotic Samburu people who were hosting me. Their dress is different. Their customs are wildly different. Yet, here we were singing about political oppression as loud as we could to drown out the rumbling noise of the diesel engine. Mike starts to explain to me that the words of the song – which is partially sung in the Jula language – sound to him like they are talking about camels resting. He sings the lyrics and describes how he understands them in either Samburu or Swahili. Of course Alpha Blondy doesn’t sing about camels but Mike doesn’t care and it certainly won’t detract from his intense enjoyment of the music.

How is it that people from such differing backgrounds could so easily bond over the simple expression of ideas through music?

Music is not alone in providing such a practical cultural bridge. Technology has just as much potential to be a cultural equalizer. However, just like the mistranslated lyrics, technology is easily misunderstood as it transitions between cultures. A big part of our job at BRCK is to ensure that technology is well optimized to serve as an enabler for cultural exchange. We want to equip these children with the capacity and the skill set to be globally competitive. We are striving to use technology as a tool for enabling this realization. Some aspects of this task are easy – kids from every culture are captivated by animated lessons on handheld tablets. Others are far more difficult – getting the teacher to understand the distraction that comes from putting a long coveted gadget into the hands of students for the first time. We can’t just rework the equation to solve out the bad from the good – unfortunately it all comes in the same glossy, irresistible package.

Elders are elders

Our self-imposed mandate at BRCK is to be champions for culturally relevant technology. To invest ourselves in designing and building platforms and tools that transcend the boundaries of our differences to bring about a unity of purpose for educating children from every socioeconomic strata. This Expedition has been a powerful reminder of how essential the human-to-human connection is to make this happen. If we want to change the entire concept of digital education in the African classroom then we – and everyone else who has a similar objective – needs to spend us much time as possible in the dirty, dusty, sandy recesses of this continent to get to know the students and teachers and find the common grounds of understanding that enables us – as technologist – to build the bridges between our different (yet not so different) cultures.

Children at Kiltamany Primary school

On the road to Korr

Philip fords a sand river in an old BMW R80G/S

Peter shares his love of photography

This morning finds us on the road north of Nairobi, heading to Samburu country in northern Kenya. [Actually, it finds us delayed by 2 hours as we troubleshoot a bit of the new education software, but that’s besides the point!]

Each year we do an expedition, last year we did a trip to Uganda testing around education. The year before that we went up to the shores of Lake Turkana. Here’s a video from our trip last year to South Africa overland:

Kenya to South Africa / Nairobi to Johannesburg from BRCK on Vimeo.

Samburu Schools

This year we’re going up to Samburu county to do two installations of our BRCK Education school system called the Kio Kit. This kit comes with 40 seven-inch tablets that are all wirelessly charged and the BRCK device acts as the brains of the network, loading content supplied by a number of different partners. All the info on the Kio Kit is in this video below.

We Introduce the Kio Kit from BRCK on Vimeo.

The trip north takes us to a school near Archer’s Post, and then a couple days later to one near Korr. Both of them are well off the road, but have been electrified by the Kenya government’s school electrification program. So, while we’re going with some extra solar kits, we’re expecting to be able to use the school’s power system.

On this trip is Mark (UX), Jeff (Design), Nivi (Education), Janet (Ops), Rufus (Customer Service) as well as Philip, myself, Juliana and Peter. It’s a full roster and we’re looking forward to having an adventurous road trip.

We’ll be posting on this trip for the next few days, so you can follow along here on our blog, on our Twitter account @BRCKnet and on our Instagram account @BRCKnet.

Those of you that have been following our blog for a while know that a number of our partners work in the education technology sphere. Today, we went back to a school in Kawangware that we first visited in April with eLimu, a Kenyan edtech startup that introduced a tablet program to help primary school students prepare for their exams.

(Read the original post at: http://brck.com/2014/04/our-problem-is-internet-on-brcks-in-schools/#.VBbj3UtGzwI)

When asked how the tablets were working back in April, the school’s headmaster Peter told us, “The tablet program works very well, our problem is internet.” The school had a WiFi router/modem installed in the office, where a reasonably high-speed cable connection was available, but they were unable to get the signal in the classrooms. To use the tablets, students had to gather outside near the small office to get a strong enough connection. When the weather was bad or the sun was too bright, the tablets couldn’t be used.

Several days ago, Peter’s school got a BRCK. By running an Ethernet cable from their modem to the BRCK, they now have internet access in three classrooms. They can use the tablets when it is raining, when the sun is hot and bright, or even when the power goes out thanks to the BRCK’s battery and 3G failover. Today, the students were watching a video about the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in the 1950s.

In Africa, it often seems that relatively small things derail big plans. Tablets can’t be used due to the sun’s glare, routers are rendered useless by voltage spikes and power outages. By addressing some of these small issues, we hope the BRCK can play a part in bringing bigger plans to fruition. We’ll bring you further updates from Peter’s school as they continue to try out new ways of learning from the worldwide web.

— — —

Want to get involved? BRCK and eLimu are looking to scale up by connecting 50 schools to the internet and providing them with tablets for learning. We also want to develop a caching system on the BRCK that could cut the cost of providing the same content to multiple tablets from ~$3 per student to less than $0.10.

We’re looking for someone who can help fund this project, so if that’s you, let us know!