Umonya: April 2013

Project Umonya held another course over the April school holidays. This three day course takes students through the progress from what is a programming to logic, functions and scope.

The photos below are the lecturers and tutors from the various days, a mixture of CS students, industry professionals and past students. 

ICT in Education

The second day of Innovate 2010 started with a few interesting applications of smartboards and Nintendo Wiis. It is interesting that they are using Python to communicate between the two. I've recently discovered that smartboards are becoming rather popular at schools around Cape Town (we even had one installed in EGS at UCT) but I'm not sure how effective they can be. I'm very keen to see what type of content teachers are developing to use on these teaching toys.

Robert and I presented Project Umonya today to a number of IT teachers from around South Africa. Speaking to them afterwards we discovered that many teachers are frustrated with the SACO format and how it doesn't fit into teaching IT, that the North West would really like a course of their own and that there may in fact be computer labs big enough to host courses at certain IEB schools (namely in Johannesburg)

While speaking to educators and NGOs who facilitate educational programs I've discovered a few resources that people may wish to browse, namely Living Maths, Free High School Textbooks (FHSST) and Fullmarks (website pending). Its amazing what resources are available. Project Umonya is hoping to feed their upcoming resource packs into the FHSST system for a greater distribution.

Tomorrow is the final day of the conference and I am keen to network a bit more and discover a few more useful contacts to help us on our way.

Innovate 2010

Yesterday was the first day of the three day conference in Innovate 2010 Schools ICT Conference held in Cape Town at the Cape Academy of Mathematics, Science and Technology. I first started working at this conference in 2001 (when I was still in high school) and today I am presenting for Project Umonya.

The first keynote speaker of the day Masha du Toit discussed Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants. I'd never really considered the difference or that the distinction existed, I'd sort of accepted that I was born when computers became ubiquitous but that others had an affinity to technology that could have existed in any age (someone had to invent the stuff)

The second keynote speaker for the event was Johannes Cronje from CPUT. He spoke about the Seven Ages of Technology in Education. It was a highly entertaining experience as he traversed the world of Shakespeare for examples.

During the afternoon I sat through what could have easily been a marketing pitch for Apple. I own an Apple MacBook and still felt both bemusement and despair of the missed opportunity to showcase a proper message. The Parklands Apple One2One project is an experiment in introducing laptops into the classroom. Teachers promoted iLife as the solution to all the learners problems. They forgot to mention that everything they trumpeted on iLife is available as Open Source software (and hence less expensive than buying a MacBook).

The Parklands teachers and IT specialists missed a key opportunity, one I hope others will correct over the next two days, that of user generated content. The team spoke about the learners enthusiasm at generating new content but this doesn't have to be done on a MacBook. I despair that the message was completely lost as the teachers attributed all success to the technology itself.

Conquering Maties

This weekend Project Umonya and the University of Stellenbosch co-hosted a Python course at the University of Stellenbosch (Maties). With 90 learners RSVP'd for the course we were in for a long long weekend full of lectures, tutoring and exercises.

The UCT team arrived with the sparrows to Stellenbosch to help with registration and the setup of computers to handle streaming between labs. We were experimenting for the first time with this in preparation for next years increase in students. After a few technical glitches we have found a suitable solution that can be reproduced with 'relative' ease.

Henk, Robert, Graham and I took turns lecturing the fundamentals of Python, from what is a program all the way through variables, loops, lists and even functions. Graham even demoed Visual Python to the advanced students.


Andre kindly came in to talk about Pygame, which I'm now keen to try out (when I have spare time).

If you are keen to get involved, email me and I'll send you the some info.

Algorithm Circle: 3rd Python Course

This afternoon is the start of the 3rd Python Course for learners between ages 11 and 17 at the University of Cape Town. The Algorithm Circle is hosting the course with roughly 100 learners from the Western Cape. Normally I would say Cape Town but we have a few learners travelling from Hermanus and Paarl to join us (and a few from Johannesburg)

As today is the final day of the YSSP in Vienna I am obviously not able to lecture this time round. Good luck to the team in Cape Town, I'll eagerly await feedback on Monday.

The design above is for the new volunteer t-shirts that was very kindly designed for us. Are you a coding superhero? I can't wait to get my tshirt when I get back.

Full steam ahead

It is full steam ahead for Project Umonya and the UCT Algorithm Circle. Advertisements went out last week for the Python course from 27-29 August 2010 hosted by the UCT Algorithm Circle. If you want to apply or know anyone who would like to attend visit www.umonya.co.za. We are currently revamping notes, sorting out the logistics and its going to awesome fun. s1 has graciously sponsored the weekend course and we are very thankful that SA companies are so keen to get involved in initiatives as these.

Project Umonya is also progressing at the speed of light. We're in major logistical planning mode with universities for hosting course in KZN and Gauteng. Once these are confirmed we'll move on to flights, advertising, accommodation etc. The CMS is up and content is slowly being added as and when it fits into our schedules.

If you know anyone that would be willing to sponsor printing course notes for 1000 students please contact me.

Official Google Blog

Project Umonya (University of Cape Town) was specifically mentioned in the Official Google Blog. They have high hopes for us and we are currently working hard to deliver.

Face2Face meetings: a thing of the past?

As some know I'm now a part of Project Umonya, a Google CS4HS initiative at UCT. Since it is being run by essentially computer geeks we seem to have moved away from face to face meetings (this is difficult at the moment with 1 in Austria, 1 in Switzerland, 1 in USA, 1 in Stellenbosch and 1 in Cape Town). Instead we have moved entirely into the realm of online meetings and planning tools.

Firstly meetings are scheduled on Doodle to find a time that suits everyone. The time is then decided and a Google Calendar invite/iCal event is sent out as a reminder.

Meeting agendas are posted on Etherpad for comment and editing a day or two before the scheduled date/time, you can save revisions, highlight changes by different people in different colours (the only drawback are no attachment/image facility).

The meetings themselves take place on IRC or Google Group Chat (depends on the SA internet connection). Any supporting documents are posted on pastebin for review. A bot on the IRC channel then takes minutes (I'm not kidding, you set it to meeting mode and tell it to record decisions and full log and attendance). If we need to conscript volunteers, we create a Doodle form with time availability options.

Minutes are compiled at the end and sent via email for review of decisions and todo lists and then the cycle starts again for a progress meeting. I know it sounds crazy but it seems to be working

Project Umonya: CS4HS Workshop

Project Umonya is an realisation of a lot of hard work by the UCT Algorithm Circle. Umonya means Python in Zulu, Python being the language of choice for teaching beginners. The UCT Algorithm Circle submitted a proposal to Google for its Computer Science 4 High School (CS4HS) funding grants. AC proposed to run 4 courses across the country for up to 250 school children between grades 7-9 in each location. This is the most ambitious undertaking of the AC yet. An article from the Monday Paper on the most recent course we ran shows the 75 high school students we coached through the basics of programming and algorithms, which at the time we considered rather large. The next course is set for August and we're scaling up to 100 high school students this time.

Google accepted the proposal last week and agreed to partially fund it and thus we are forging ahead with plans, logistics and redesigning our course content (theory, examples and exercises). The next step is to recruit more tutors into the project. We have a wonderful mix of postgraduate and undergraduate students (and a few very bright high school students) working as both tutors and lecturers, the entire project is run by students, a feat in itself.

We (the students) volunteer our time as we feel strongly about increasing the country's capacity for computer science and allowing early high school students the opportunity to experience CS to make an informed decision in choosing it as a subject. We hope to provide encourage and enthusiasm for the subject we all love. If some of them go on to win CS competitions, even better.

The format going forward is to train a core group of lecturers and tutors from UCT and then bring in the university students as additional tutors at each location. This provides them an opportunity to share their passion, talk about their experiences and hopefully build teaching capacity to expand the project even further in future years (long term goal).

If you know of anyone who you think would be interested in the project (high school student, uni student wanting to tutor, sponsors, printers etc please spread the word)