(3/19) Recap 2021 - Neighborhood Classes

I got to Mogotio, Kenya in March with 44 laptops in my bags. Primary schools in Mogotio didn’t open for a few weeks, so I had some extra time to experiment with our curriculum.

I hosted a cohort of kids from the neighborhood in our apartment every morning for computer class. We started with touch-typing.

At first the kids would get bored of the class quickly. But after augmenting our touch-typing application with a leaderboard, levels and badges, they were motivated and competing just like any other computer game.

The six weeks I had with the neighborhood kids was enough time to introduce other skills like photo editing, design and even coding.

By the time schools opened, we had a clear idea how we could teach these skills to larger classes. It guided the kind of lessons we later rolled out to 4,000 kids in 10 different schools.