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Rube Goldberg fun [2014-10-19]

Saturday we participated in a teachers’ workshop sponsored by Arusha Node Marie (http://www.arushanodemarie.or.tz/).  The workshop was for teachers to learn more about IT and the internet, and the coordinators invited Neal and me to give a two-hour demonstration of the Reneal IEO system.  Neal spent Friday evening tinkering here in our room, and ended up with a improvised (but very clever) system to replicate a Reneal IEO computer lab for the workshop.

One of our ANM contacts had dropped off a 1Tb USB hard drive to get a copy of the full Reneal IEO system, including RACHEL and the Khan Academy videos (the whole image takes about 500 Mb of disk space).  During the workshop, Neal booted his laptop from that USB drive so it could function as the server.  He used a phone sim in our Android tablet to create a wifi hotspot, and then used the wireless in his laptop to get internet into the server.  The ANM folks had brought a 24-port network switch and Ethernet cables, so we plugged the “server” into that.  We booted my laptop to the network as a client computer and ran the video from that into the LED projector for display.  Some of the other teachers also connected their laptops as clients (although we had a few for which we couldn’t find the right keystroke to boot from the network).  Thus with a couple of daypacks of stuff and a collection of laptops, we had a “lab” up and running to give the demo.  It was a snarl of wires, but enough to give the teachers an idea of the system capabilities.

Post-workshop comments were positive.  Having a system this easy to install and maintain is very attractive to the IT teachers, and they appreciate the wealth of resources available in the Reneal IEO system across many subject areas.  Many of these schools, even though they have internet, are running slow older computers.  This raises the prospect of just adding a server to a school and turning those slow stand-alone computers into good-performing clients.  Computers that are not usable due to hard disk failure are suddenly viable again.

Arusha Node Marie has a fascinating history, helping to bring the internet to the Arusha area many years ago.  (Habari Node Ltd, mentioned earlier in this blog as generous donors of the time of two skilled professionals to put in the cabling at Mwandet, actually spun off from ANM.)  ANM has a strong philanthropic presence in Arusha, providing free internet for almost 20 schools in the area.  That is no small matter, since it can cost around $600 for the mast and radio infrastructure and up to $150 a month for internet service.  We are excited to explore the possibility of joining forces with them to bring technology to more students and teachers in Tanzania!

In other news, we finished up the installation at Ilkiding’a Secondary School on Friday, and we’ll return Monday for the teacher orientation training.  Wednesday and Thursday we hope to do site evaluations for potential 2015 candidates for projects.  Then on to Musoma on Friday for the final computer lab installation.