Project Rwanda

In coordination with Students In Free Enterprise (SIFE) a group of Carnegie Mellon students ventured to Kigali Rwanda for ten days in May to work with the fifth grade students of Kagugu Primary School. Project Rwanda was created by CIT students Josh Debner and Sruthi Reddy Chintakunta and two other CMU students. Melvin Rayappa and Wishal Agrawal, also CIT students, joined the group along with several students from Carnegie Mellon's Qatar campus.

The goal of the project was to work with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) association to help establish digital literacy and create educational opportunities for children in the developing country. The Kagugu Primary School kids were all given XO-1 laptops. The XOs are a great learning medium because they are rugged, low-cost, low power and come pre-installed with software for kids to engage in collaborative, self-empowered learning. The Project Rwanda team from CMU split into three groups to work with the children on different activities after their regular school day for a week.

Debner, Chintakunta, Rayappa and Agrawal created a lesson plan based on Scratch, a programming language created by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. The program makes it easy for kids to create stories while learning math and computation skills. "We agreed that since Scratch was a simpler program, we would spend less time teaching the kids how to actually press the buttons and more time how to actually utilize Scratch in a more purposeful way. It's not too difficult to launch the Scratch activity and put random blocks together to create a random animal moving in random directions. What is more challenging is to use Scratch to create a story with a setting, a plot, and different characters that interact with one another," said Rayappa.

Throughout the week the children worked on constructing a virtual storytelling world with characters focusing on relationships and conflict resolutions. The CMU team was very impressed with how well the Rwandan students took to activities. "Learning programming, music and acting at their age is impressive. The OLPC people were very welcoming and trusted us a lot," said Chintakunta. At the end of the week the students got a chance to present their work at a "finale" celebration held at a nearby church.

The team hopes to make Project Rwanda sustainable through distance education, though most members are eager to return. "Rwanda, the land of a thousand hills, is so beautiful. Africa was not even on my life list of places I wanted to see, and now I am pretty sure I want to go back to Africa again," said Chintakunta.