A Day in the Lyfe: Diary of an OLPCorps Crazy

And Several Weeks Later....

We find our three intrepid explorers deep in the midst of their teaching experience. Apologies for writing so infrequently but there really has been little time to do so as we've just had so much to do.
Each morning we arise around 7 to have breakfast next door at Mr. Orock's house, prepared by Mr. Orock's charming wife Madame Amelia or one of her many helpers in the kitchen such as Big M, Claudette, or Judith. From here we proceed, rain or shine, up the path which resembles more a river bed when dry, a real river when precipitating to the UAC Compound that includes the Cyber Cafe where I am writing, the Nursery School where the UAC Summer Holiday Classes take place and the UAC office where it all began and where we store the laptops each evening, and where the younger students ages 7 to 10 in our laptop classes are taught.
Depending on the day or the weather we may do Harambee with the kids before we start, a program we do at home in Philadelphia with our afterschool children that involves many cheers and chants to get excited about learning. The word come from a Swahili tradition and means "Everyone pulls together", needless to say the kids really love it and we often catch them clapping and singing the chants on their own outside of class.
Then we split the students up and the older ones ages 11 to 13 come with me, transported by the signature UAC vans, to Bwitingi, a nearby village where the new Jamadianle school has been built and where there is a larger hall to accommodate them.
Our classes run from 9 to 11 and we have accomplished several learning projects designed to emphasize the basics and to challenge the creativity of the students while they are also introduced to new programs and the many capabilities of the XO. Over the past few weeks the students in the older class have created superheroes and drawn them in paint, imported their pictures into write and written a back story to their heroes lives. They then went on Wikipedia and copied selections from different scientific articles relating to their heroes superpowers and pasted these under a separate section of their profiles. They have also made numbered lists of things describing themselves and then had the lists taken and mixed up so that they had to play a game to find out who each list described. They have taken notes in Write using bulleted lists on Mesh Networking and used chat to talk to each other. They have explored Memorize and made their own Memorize games matching phrases in their local Pidgin dialect to phrases in standard English, which they then swapped and played each others games. Most recently we talked about story writing, about setting, plot, conclusion and characters, after which I gave them a list of different animals and a list of themes from which they picked to write their own fairy tales. On Monday they will be making scenes from their stories, which they illustrated with photos and painted pictures today, come to like in Scratch, as the list I provided was made up only of animals that are options as Sprites. Also starting on Monday they will have the opportunity to sign-out their personal laptop at the end of the day and take it home with them, something we have been planning so as to happen in the most efficient and organized manner so that the students can share their work with their families and explore at home, while still guaranteeing that we are able to use the laptops in the other innovative capacities we are exploring.
At 11 after the 100 students have their class, we have alternating classes from the Jamadianle School Summer Classes come in accompanied by their teachers to go through a lesson that serves the dual purpose of introducing the XO's to these students as well as giving the teachers experience using them in he classroom.
At noon we have a teacher training two days a week, and the other days just have time to get all the laptops plugged in and charging before we are do back at the Orock's house for lunch at 1pm.
At 4 pm, after a short rest break (read: time to do laundry or write a blog) We take a load of the charged XOs along with sports equipment out to some of the villages surrounding the town of Buea. We play games with these children and then let them play on the XOs as part of the UAC's village outreach called the Summer Holiday Caravan. Many of these children have never seen a computer before and so it is quite a challenge to work with them to where they have enough ability to explore and do things on their own.
We return from the caravan just after 6, and with the evening fading fast we rush to put away all the laptops and chargers so that we can make it back to the house for supper before the darkness makes walking along the slippery uneven road a sure recipe for a mud covered bum and a severely injured pride.

That's a day in the life of Team DBF Cameroon, its supper time now and I am ravenous, more on our trips and some challenges soon, until next time folks!