Hey teacher, how do I type a hash(#)?
Introduction
I spent about 2.5 years in Rwanda serving as an IT education volunteer. It was an alternative service for Korean mandatory military service by KOICA (Korea International Cooperation Agency) under Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The above quote was the very first question I got from my students in my first lecture with the classic ‘Hello World!’ example. This C/C++ programming course was intended for second-year IT-major students in a college in Rwanda.
...and this turned out to be one of my better days.
But my keyboard does not have [#]!
Challenges (a.k.a. The Reality)
When another student shouted right after my short instructions on how to use shift key, I realised that student had a German keyboard. Some students even had Arabic keyboards!
But again, this was one of my better days – because, at least, the school had electricity on that day.
Frequent power outage
How many people in developing countries have 24/7 access to electricity? Some obvious things for us are considered luxuries for people living in this part of the world. Teaching any computer-related things without power was a great challenge for me and colleagues.
This fact extends to personal access to computers, not to mention individual's ability to afford one. We can safely assume the lecture hours are the only chances for students to use computers.
Power outage also causes maintenance issue. Due to the unstable electricity, computers have significantly lower lifespan, forcing schools to spend more money into parts.
Rainy season
This may sound strange, but the weather was a great blocker for running courses for two main reasons.
First reason is that during the rain, it is extremely dangerous to move in Rwanda due to high chances of lightning strikes. Also, one of the main affordable and reliable transportations is moto-taxi, which cannot run in heavy rain. This means most of the students will not make it to the school in such weather.
Another reason rain hinders lecture is due to tin roofs. Most Rwandan schools and houses are built with affordable tin roofs, which make much noise during rain. In a pouring rain, it is simply impossible to hear anything under such roof.
Language barrier
Education in Rwanda after primary school is officially done in English. However, in rural areas where average education rate is relatively lower, it is realistically not possible to give lectures only in English.
On the other hand, there was no material on IT education written in Kinyarwanda language, so it was a great challenge for us to prepare our own lecture materials.
Approach
It is obvious that we, as a group of volunteers, cannot radically solve all the problems at once. We had to focus on what we could achieve within our service period.
Our primary goal (targeted for IT education volunteers) was very clear – effectively teach students on how to type. We simply could not move on to next lecture without students being able to type!
We decided to make a typing practice software, and we defined three main approaches to help ourselves achieve the goal:
Localisation
The main reason we decided to develop another typing practice software was because there was surprisingly no available multilingual solution. The whole point of this is to make education material written in Kinyarwanda language.
Playfulness
The software is mainly for teaching young students, and we also observed many of them are often afraid to use computer for the first time. We tried to make our software joyful so students can enjoy learning to type.
Literacy
Many students in Rwanda have limited access to books. Statistics show literacy rate in Rwanda was below 70% in 2012. We thought we could help them read more by including literatures for long paragraph typing exercises.
Process
Once our approaches were defined, we quickly started to build the actual software, aiming for a quick proof-of-concept test.
The team focused on building a working prototype for the test phase. Meanwhile, we also gathered supporters from KOICA volunteers to arrange user testing sessions together with Rwanda Education Board.
User test
With the help of Rwanda Education Board and participating schools, we were able to gather students to try our software. We wanted to test if students could follow instructions, but more importantly, we wanted to know if this actually is an effective way of teaching. Below are our key findings.
Teaching methods
During our tests, it became clear that students have no problem in following our software if we give them clear instructions. This also meant proper training for teachers on utilising the software is necessary.
Missing features
Our observations gave some inspirations on features as well. For example, we found out that students tended to keep their eyes on on-screen keyboard, which prevented them from improving – so we implemented a feature to completely hide the keyboard.
Technical considerations
Although we were aware our software needed to run on low-end machines, there still were things we could not consider, for example, ultra-low resolution. Our test sessions helped us to ensure more coverage for schools.
Collaboration with Rwanda Education Board
One of the biggest challenges we had was the Kinyarwanda language. Also, gathering contents for typing exercises was extremely difficult due to lack of digital database on literature as well as rarity of Rwandan literatures.
For this, we collaborated with Rwanda Education Board to gather usable contents. They were able to provide us with already existing course materials, and they offered us to help with translating English literatures.
In addition, they agreed to include typing practice as an official curriculum for all Rwandan schools, which would significantly make distribution easier. To support the process, KOICA offered to sponsor software CD production and provide trainings for teachers.
Outcome
Based on the user test outcomes, we finalised our software with improved features and local contents provided by Rwanda Education Board. At the same time, we proceeded to organise teaching sessions to introduce it as well as train first group of teachers and students.
Nyaruka /ˈɲaruka/ n. to be quick
The software
The name Nyaruka was suggested by Rwanda Education Board, which – according to them – straightforwardly represents the purpose of “enhancing typing speed.”
The structure of the program is similar to other existing typing practice software, with keyboard position training and various exercises ranging from single characters to long paragraphs.
We tried to gamify the learning process, hence the joyful design style with game-like interfaces. We found this very effective, as several people during showcase events challenged us to compete with typing speed. Interestingly, the gamifying process itself helped us to naturally come up with new evaluation criteria such as frequently mistaken keys.
Applying to the field
After finalising our software, we actively sought for opportunities to utilise it in actual teaching situations. While in bulk production, it was pre-distributed to KOICA volunteers who could directly apply it in their teaching.
We were also invited to Techkobwa camp – Tech-girl camp – organised by Peace Corps and Michigan State University as part of women empowerment programme. Together with their volunteers, we gave effective typing lessons to Rwandan girls using our software, along with other general IT courses.
It was a great opportunity to test, develop and share teaching methods with education experts from the field, especially because many of KOICA volunteers did not have any pedagogical knowledge. We later shared our learnings with KOICA community to apply new methods in our teaching. Detailed evaluation report on Techkobwa camp can be found here.
Sorry, we need to remove the content about the Genocide.
The Last Moment Failure
Everything seemed to be going so well, until the very last moment. And there was nothing we could do about it.
Rwanda Education Board has informed KOICA shortly after the production of software CDs that they cannot distribute CDs until we fix our content. We tried to triple check our contents together with the board members before the production, but unfortunately, this nevertheless happened.
Things got really tricky as KOICA had already spent all budgets to produce CDs, and to make things worse, the team's service period was almost ending. If things could not be solved within a few weeks, there would nothing we could do.
Rwanda Education Board and KOICA had several meetings to seek for solutions, but sadly the conflict only became worse into political arguments. Eventually, the distribution was postponed indefinitely, with neither side following up until today.
Learnings and Next Steps
A project can nevertheless fail – the team learnt it the hard way. Although we, as experienced volunteers in the actual fields, were clearly aware anything unexpected could happen, it was very hard for us to accept the result. The reason behind our failure was completely out of our control, and there was nothing we could do about it – a painful, but a lifetime lesson.
How can we teach IT without any digital tools?
Despite the unsatisfactory result, like any other projects, our journey gave us priceless learnings. I personally found the collaboration with Peace Corps and Michigan State University really opened up my eyes.
As a computer education volunteer coming from non-teaching background, I have never thought about teaching the digital world without plugs. However, what those education experts demonstrated in the camp made me realise how creative teaching could be, and also how unprepared I was in giving such education to others.
Just like preparing design workshops, those volunteers prepared a number of activities students could easily do without any power – for example, playing with binaries using simple black-and-white cards!
Applying teaching methods for and with typing practice
Such experience also made me wonder if there would be more effective ways in teaching how to type. None of the team had any knowledge in pedagogy, nor did we learn typing with a software like this.
I recently (2019) had a good discussion with a friend regarding this project, as I am currently planning to re-develop the software. He suggested me to focus on utilising the software in teaching rather than focusing on the typing itself, as most of us ourselves learnt typing naturally rather than by practicing with a software.
Inspired by this, and also looking back on one of our first aims to increase literacy, I hope to re-launch this project in open source and suggest a new school curriculum for developing countries, in which students have more chances to read and type.