Day eight
We met again with the teachers from the boys’ high school to flesh out more details of their plan to introduce computer literacy education to their students. They want to begin teaching the 10th and 12th grades when the new school year starts in April, because the 9th grade takes at least a month to...
Day seven
We met with seven teachers, including Ashish, Salar, and Divya, at the boys’ high school today to brainstorm ideas about how to introduce computer literacy education to the students there. The following are my notes from the meeting: Class size 9th – 340 10th – 200 11th – 100 (64 taking physics) 12th – 150...
Day six
In the morning, we worked with the high school girls again. Maybe because it was New Year’s and they’d been partying the night before, they seemed a little distracted and unfocused, but we tried to work through it with an exercise in Word. Kalpana came by to help out with her students. It might be...
Day five
This morning, we worked with five of Kalpana’s students from the girls’ high school as part of our effort to observe the ways in which people of different ages (elementary-school children, high schoolers, young teachers, and older teachers) approach and absorb computer education. The girls above, left to right, are Shivange (12th grade), Prachi (1th...
Day four
We worked with Kalpana by herself in the morning; since she was sick on Sunday, we reviewed some basic Word and Windows concepts to solidify the fundamentals. She’s planning on bringing some girls from her class tomorrow. My goal was never to teach students directly, because it’s a fairly unsustainable model, but I think it’s...
Day three
Today we visited the girls’ high school (above), which used to be the boys’ middle school that my dad attended. We met with some teachers and administrators who again mentioned that the school will be receiving 15-25 computers (the exact number seems to vary depending on who we talk to) from the government in April....
Asha Rani
Asha Rani was recently elected to the Madhya Pradesh Legislative Assembly from the Bijawar District, and she’s been making the rounds through the village. She came here today. This truck has been coming around once or twice a day, playing Hindi music and blasting announcements to publicize her visit. The street was totally filled by...
Day two
These three middle-school children (somehow related to me – don’t ask me how) showed up this morning around 11 am to learn how to use computers. In this small village, everyone knows everything, and people have been dropping by to sate their curiosity about what we’re doing for the past couple of days. The two...
Day one
Yesterday, we asked people to sign up for two-hour time slots over the next two days – Saturday and Sunday – during which they could come here to my grandmother’s house and start exploring the laptops we brought with us. Unfortunately, one of the laptops wasn’t working (due to an inexplicably missing .dll file), but...
The first meeting
Prabha and her daughter Sonali are the two women from Bijawar with whom we have been talking since the inception of this project, both to gauge the interest of people in computer education and to have someone on the ground who could communicate with other people, such as the principals of the high schools. Prabha...
Misadventures in flying
Getting to Bijawar from San Francisco requires two full days of travel. Getting to Delhi alone, via Europe or East Asia, requires two flights and 25-35 hours, depending on how long the layovers are. From Delhi, you can either catch the Shatabdi train to Jhansi, which takes hours, or a commuter plane to Khajuraho, which...