Pretoria-based House4Hack is paying it forward by teaming up with non-profit organisation, African Schools for Excellence, to bring technology into the lives of Grade 7 students in Tsakane in Johannesburg’s East Rand.
The African Schools for Excellence is based on the internationally regarded Khan Academy model where scholars use tablets and laptops to view online educational videos.
In this model, a student will review a video as many times as necessary in order to grasp the material without fear of ridicule by the other scholars.
“Learners, in many instances, are afraid to raise their hands in class because of the fear of being labelled stupid or sometimes the opposite, too smart. We have found that using videos is a much more effective way to teach the concepts,” explains Toby Kurien, a consultant on the program.
The program is led by Jay Kloppenberg and he is currently working with Grade 7 pupils with the specific focus being on mathematics and English.
“English lessons are devised so that the scholars write essays each and every day. They are marked and assessed on the same day as opposed to traditional methods where assignments are graded quarterly or so on. He uses a similar approach with Maths as he uses the Khan Academy videos,” continues Kurien.
According to Kurien, the class is divided into three groups who work through sessions of 30 minutes. One group will have a 30 minute video session of what they are about to learn using, for example, a Khan Academy video.
The second group will be with the teacher who will go through the concepts and answer questions. The third group will do a team exercise in which they will be given questions and have to figure it out as a group. The idea is that stronger students are paired with weaker students whom they can assist in a language that the teacher would not be able to use to explain.
“That’s the initial idea but to enable all of this they needed technology. I was looking for a way to get android tablets into schools because I believe it’s kind of crossed a threshold where laptops have failed. Tablets are much easier to learn and maintain, with these devices you simply switch them on, they boot straight up into the app you are training the scholars in and then you switch them off and put them into a cupboard. I see that as a revolutionary thing as opposed to the traditional ways of getting tech into classrooms,” says Kurien.
In June of last year, House4Hack hosted what they call ‘Random Hacks of Kindness’ and Kurien used the opportunity to have his friend Kloppenberg pitch the idea to the assembled techies.
“The essential problem being that we want to get Khan Academy into the classroom but in South Africa our bandwidth is very limited and so we wanted it all offline as opposed to the States where it all works online,” says Kurien.
The challenge was how to get Khan Academy to work offline and so Kurien and some of the other hackers developed software that could download it offline. They then put a wrapper around it which makes it simple enough to be viewed from within an android tablet.
“One of the nice things about this model is that you don’t need a tablet for each child and they are not needed the entire time. So when they watch a video you only need a tablet to share between the children and so we only need around 40 tablets. We have 40 sponsored Google Chromebooks and set up for the classroom and that’s how we are presenting the Khan Academy work and its working brilliantly,” Kurien enthusiastically continues.
House4Hack has also added value to the project with its Peer Marker project, which is aimed at improving the student’s English skills. The pupils are given a writing assignment each day which needs to be marked on the same day. However, as this is obviously too labour intensive for a single teacher, an alternative solution had to be devised.
House4Hack founder Schalk Heunis is the man responsible for devising the Peer Marker solution.
“The scholars are given 15 minutes to enter the essay into the device and then after 15 minutes it will go into a marking session and in the marking session each student will be given a random allocation of two essays from within the classroom but not know whose they are marking,” says Heunis.
“On the tablet screen they will have a slide that asks which was better or if they were equally good. Each student will grade two essays and then click next and then grade another two and then another two so at most they have three pairs of essays to evaluate,” continues Heunis.
Using a statistical model and algorithm, the teacher will then have a fully graded list and the students will able to see their progress and receive immediate feedback.
According to Kurien, the results of the two projects have been jaw-dropping: “Just within the recent three week accelerate program the scholars participate in they saw massive improvements including a 120% improvement on math scores.”
While many challenges exist in bringing technology and education together, the work being done by House4Hack and the African Schools for Excellence can only signpost the way for future collaboration between the two spaces and continued success for scholars.
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