Serena Williams is welcomed by students

@ilab Africa research institute’s project ‘Use of ICT in Enhancing Teaching and Curriculum Delivery in Marginalized Secondary Schools in Kenya‘ is the 2011 winner of the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU) Outreach and Community Relations award!

The main aim of the project is to partner with secondary schools in marginal areas of Kenya in order to develop and support the delivery of Computer Studies offered as part of the Kenya Certificate of Secondary School Examination (KCSE) curriculum.

In May 2009, the project received a $100,000 from the HP Innovations in Education Grant, and an additional $15,000 from the Internet Society (www.isoc.org). In its second year, the project also received funding and support from Google ($20,000), and Safaricom Kenya ($4,000).

The project involves five schools located in marginal areas in or around Nairobi. The schools were Moi Girls Secondary School - Isinya, and Olkejuado High School in Kajiado County; Machakos Girls High School in Machakos County; and Gatanga High School, Kahuhia Girls High School in Muranga County.

High school students taking Computer Studies are expected to learn and develop practical ICT skills. In the final year of study, the students are expected to develop a complete software project using a recommended set of tools and programming languages.

However, schools in marginal areas have limited, outdated or non- existent ICT infrastructure; inadequate teaching capacity, and constrained financial resources. In addition, these schools are also located in areas of low economic activity with attendant socio-economic challenges including the discrimination of the girl-child.

The project team comprised of five lecturers and 20 IT undergraduate students from the Faculty of Information Technology. In February 2010, then world number one tennis player and HP Goodwill Ambassador Serena Williams visited the University to meet members of the project team. 

Undergraduate students have made more than 60 visits to the schools to mentor and support Computer Studies pupils. Among other activities, the students assist in programming project supervision and encourage the girls to take up computer studies as their future careers.

Lecturers visit to schools to give motivational talks to the high school students. Under the project, about 60 Computer Studies teachers and school administrators attended a National Computer Studies Teachers Conference at the University in November 2010.

The Rural Cafe project, an offline web access tool for use in schools without internet access was installed in the 5 participating schools with very impressive results. The project was a joint effort with Prof Jay Chen of New York University.

The tool has 300GB of Computer Science Education Resources crawled from the Internet. For more details, see: http://code.google.com/p/ruralcafe/wiki/Introduction.

In January 2010, over 200 high school students participated in an Open Day event at the university under the project. The aim of the event was to create interest in Computer Science among the students, especially girls.

The University entered the project in the ACU PR, Marketing and Communications Awards 2011 competition. The judges were pleased with the project’s overall strength and clear focus on student outreach.

They also said it had innovative and successful third party engagement and direct use of student volunteers. It also made use of supporting events and activities like open days, school visits, and use of HP equipment and ambassadors.

Congratulating the University on winning the award, Ms Dorothy Garland, ACU’s Director of Professional Networks said the University won in a particularly strong category of the competition.