2016 National Technovation Challenge in Uganda

Please read the article regarding the “2016 National Technovation Challenge in Uganda” in which Oysters & Pearls sponsored the participation of the Gulu High School team.

Innovations  May 15 2016.inddClick to read an article about the Gulu Team from New Vision – “Girls Create App for Bodabodas” by Jeff Andrew Lule

 

New Vision – “Uganda will be technology hub for Africa by 2030” by John Agaba, 5th August 2016

The Minister for Science, Technology and Innovation, Elioda Tumwesigye said Uganda will be a hub for science and technology in whole of Africa by 2030 during a technovation challenge at the Makerere University School of Public Health-powered ResilientAfrica Network.

It was Tumwesigye’s first day out in the field after he was appointed to the office as inaugural minister by President Yoweri Museveni late June.

During the technovation challenge that attracted teams from over 15 girl secondary schools from across Uganda, the new minister reiterated the need for science and innovations, pledging support to the network. – READ MORE

 

Coverage also included the Resilient Africa Network website: “The 2016 Uganda Technovation Challenge”

This year’s

Holiday Training – January 2015

I arrived in Gulu on a Saturday afternoon, not sure what to expect from the next two weeks. As a volunteer with the Oysters & Pearls holiday training program, I knew about the class materials and basic program setup. As I quickly learned however, there was much more to the program than just the teaching.

Joining Sandra and the instructors, I spent the weekend assisting with logistics — the little details that I had never considered, but had to be completed. Where were all the plates for the dining hall? Could we borrow mattresses for students that didn’t bring their own? Why was the electricity off in the classrooms? These and a hundred other small-but-crucial tasks had to be settled, even as students started arriving on Sunday afternoon.

Classes began immediately on Monday, and continued through the week. Sighted students were sorted into one of three classes — Engineering for the Future, Introduction to Robotics, or Advanced Robotics. As the classes delved into new materials and lessons, I watched the projects grow increasingly complex. Since I constantly moved from room to room, I saw the classes develop in snapshots. What started on day one as a collection of wires and boards became a functioning light display, then a

Engineering Camp at Gulu

It was great to be back in Gulu for my third time at the Oysters & Pearls holiday training. This was the first year we had an engineering camp designed just for girls! Eighteen girls attended the training, sixteen from secondary school and two from primary school level. In the beginning everyone was very quiet but they warmed up quickly by the end of the first day.

The first week the girls designed and created water filters. It was exciting and inspiring to watch their experimenting. Their engineering challenge was to:

Design a water cleaning process to provide clean drinking water to the girls’ dormitory.

The sample water we provided them was particularly unpleasant. We used tea leaves, mud, dirt, flowers and other various plant life, and some insects to create a nasty brew of “dirty water” that they had to clean. Their process had to include filtration and purification, and the success of their designs was evaluated based on budget, cleaning time, and quality of the water after cleaning. At the end of the week, a panel of nine teachers examined samples of the water after each team of students had cleaned it. The panel (including me) smelled the water, observed its appearance, shook it to see

A Ticket to Uganda

A quiet night spent by the Nile River A quiet night spent by the Nile River

I can remember my first conversation with Sandra Washburn of Oysters & Pearls…it was like it was yesterday. I was spending time in my hometown, Boston, teaching some workshops at the Artisan’s Asylum. Pacing my hotel room on a dreary, rain filled day I spent about an hour giving Sandra information about what I felt were the best ways to educate a population about technology. I had my hands full working with SparkFun Electronics to help achieve this goal in the United States, where we partnered with people like the Artisan’s Asylum, M.I.T., various library systems, IT-oLogy, thousands of schools, camps, organizations and other well intentioned people. Teaching Introduction to Electronics and Soldering in Uganda Teaching Introduction to Electronics and Soldering in Uganda

Sandra was talking about doing the same thing in Uganda, but with much less existing or supportive infrastructure, and for a population that sometimes has never even seen a computer before. I gave her as much information as I could and promised to connect her to a man I

Teaching Math to the Visually-Impaired in Uganda

When I came to Gulu High School last January, my first task as a Peace Corps volunteer was to identify areas of need in the school. After a number of conversations with different administrators and teachers, it was obvious that while there had been valuable efforts to make accommodations for the students with visual impairments, there were still many ways that these students were not on an equal playing field with the sighted students. There was a Braille embosser (to "print" Braille documents), a computer lab and a very dedicated Head of the Special Needs Department (Odoch Daniel).

However, Daniel explained to me that there was no math teacher for the visually impaired students. Instead, they were placed into the class for sighted students where the lectures were predominantly visual, and it was effectively impossible for a visually impaired student to follow. It would have been possible to incorporate visually impaired students in a lecture to a class of perhaps 20 or 30 students, but when you have 90 students in a class (as is common across Uganda) it is incredibly difficult to accommodate students with special needs in your lessons.

And so the students focused on their other classes and routinely failed their national

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