In June of 2017 the Education in a Suitcase nonprofit arranged the second trip to the Primary School on Takawiri Island in Lake Victoria. The purpose was to learn and start the second phase of a project involving tablet computers linked to a server running the personalised tutor-web educational software.

Preparations

Lots of stuff to prepare. Choose&buy tablets; redesign the USB sticks; load material onto sticks, test, test, test.

Of course the core of the project is the tutor-web drilling system. This is all set up and freely available, but our destination did not have general Internet access so the system needed to be downloaded onto USB sticks to be run off a small Intel NUC server. While we're at it, other stuff also gets installed on the server (all of Wikipedia; the Gutenberg project; Khan Academy).

The tablets of choice ended up being the Amazon Fire 7" tablets. Nice little things at a really really good price. They easily handled the tutor-web and the Silk browser seemed fine so why make life complicated? We ordered 90 of them and repacked to have 4 in each package.

That made the whole thing fit into handluggage acceptable to British Airways.

To get to Takawiri you can first drive to Mbita and then take a ferry across to Takawiri Island.

Takawiri is an island in Lake Victoria. There are no cars, no traditional roads, no WiFi, no Internet, no general electricity. It was suggested as a testbed for Education in a Suitcase as a final proof-of-concept: If the system works here it should work anywhere in Kenya. This is our second time. Last year a server was installed and the students each got a tablet. Everything was well-received last year. Now we had a chance to learn from any mishaps and improve things.

Like so many other regions in Kenya, Mbita is very much a low-income region. The picture is taken from the location where the ferry docks.

Delivery

Each student got one tablet with their name on it.

The next step was to get people logged in. Not quite trivial -- noone had logged into anything before, but eventually everyone got into the system.

You'll see some younger siblings eagerly checking everything out, through the windows.

It does not take long for kids to realise how much you can use a tablet computer.

We start these sessions always by demonstrating how to log into the tutor-web and do a very simple arithmetic tutorial, just to get everyone started. Then people are free to move on, towards more difficult math drills.

Last year someone asked "does this only do math?" and wanted to look at chemistry :-) When we pointed out Wikipedia and Khan Academy, they dug around and were balancing chemical equations within 15 minutes!!

We sometimes ask the students to check out "Iceland", which normally noone has heard of. This time, as we introduced Wikipedia and talked a bit about Iceland and Manchester, we got immediate network congestion as everyone wanted to read up on Iceland, Manchester or Manchester United on Wikipedia!

It really isn't just about math: It is also about having the option of educating yourself by having access to reading material.

At Takawiri, the ferry sometimes docks on a "fishing beach". All the Takawiri beaches are amazingly beautiful yellow-sand beaches. The picture at the top is one such beach.

Don't forget though, that Takawiri is a low-income region. The schoolyard below demonstrates what is meant by low-income here. There is no extravagance in anything.

The server will run happily with no Internet connection. However, if it does have such a connection, it will send data back to the central tutor-web server in Iceland. Without such a connection in 2016, the server had to be transported by ferry to Mbita and from there to Kisumu in order to get an Internet connection and sync back.

Transporting data by ferry in quite cool, but in order to move on, a directional antenna was brought along this time, installed and connected. Lo and behold we had an Internet connection through the enhanced mobile phone connection.

It's not just about studying. You can also use the tablets to take pictures of the visitors :-)