In the Club

I went to my first school today. (My second if you count the Christian community school I visited, but I didn't interact with any students there, and it's got way nicer facilities than I expect most other schools.)

I went along with an NGO that works with youth clubs to promote children's rights and life skills. I'm going to see a number of schools with this group to better understand what kind of contextual factors related to computer use, HIV/AIDS, or the school setup in that area might make a pilot study easier or harder there.

The club meets in one of the classrooms:

The kids are between 10 and 16, and I had them try the computers without instruction and describe their thought process to help when I actually go and design the computer program.

They had some trouble with it--I couldn't even get the thing open until somebody showed me how. One of the kids had a computer at home, so he figured out relatively quickly how to get into a text program and was asking why he couldn't connect to websites. This girl hadn't seen a computer before, so she was shy about trying things. This will probably be even more the situation in rural areas.



After the club meeting and trying the computers, the club's president (the one helping the other girl with the computer) brought a cake she had made herself for everyone, and we had refrescos (sodas).