Raspberry Pi and RACHEL

Big changes are coming to Maranyundo!  This little device called the Raspberry Pi has been making waves all over the tech community for the last few years.  It is a credit card sized computer that only costs $35!  It was specifically designed by a nonprofit to be used in education for teaching students coding, but soon enough techies in the developing world started swooping in and making it work for their uniqueproblems.  One such project is called RACHEL standing for Remote Areas Community Hotspots for Education and Learning.  This is an offline digital library sent through a network to any computer that tries to access the pi (Here is an online version of the library).  It includes resources licensed under creative commons including textbooks developed by the state of California, Khan Academy videos and interactive exercises, much of Wikipedia, .books from Project Gutenburg and much more!

Maranyundo describes itself as a School of Excellence and part of this high standard is to use technology in teaching for the benefit of students.  This is not always so easy because of the unreliable internet and electricity.  But RACHEL-Pi requires no electricity, as it is battery powered (you can still use it on a battery powered laptop, which every teacher has) and supplies its own wireless network that computers connect to as if it were wifi. The Maranyundo Initiative Board visited the school last week and they brought the Rachel-Pi and donated by an organization in Boston  through one of the founders of the school.

Marcella showing how to use the technology

Working together with individual questions

Exploring RACHEL independently!

There was staff training a few days later.  I expected only teachers to come, but the headmistress was so supportive of the technology that she implored even the librarian and secretary to attend. It couldn’t have gone better.  The teachers all brought their computers to follow along with the demonstration.  I also have to point out that even with almost 20 computers connected to the network, the Pi was still faster than the usual internet!  It was really amazing.

Now my next step is to find additional, Rwanda specific content to add to RACHEL. It would be great if there were more English exercises, Kinyarwanda content, National Exam standards and perhaps even some lessons about coding because that is the original vision of the Raspberry Pi. I’m sure I will think of more as time goes by!  The big challenge here will be to find information that is not under any copyright or other protection.  If I have any coding friends who would like to help with this in any way, I would be eternally grateful (not even exaggerating). Please get in touch with me if you are at all interested in giving me even 5 minutes of your time for this project.

When you aren’t using RACHEL, the Pi can be used with just a monitor and a keyboard as its own computer on a Linux Operating System. Then you can do anything! So I also want to learn some coding and possibly teach it to the girls or maybe even start a robotics club! If any of my friends want to help me in this initiative in any way, that would be great because I have no idea what I’m doing :p But I’m so excited to find out where this can take the school! Now I just need to take a deep breath and go one step at a time!