Off To Malawi

So after months of waiting this Friday, I head out to Malawi for 5 weeks. I'm off leading a team of teachers and undergraduates from the UK, to work with teachers and students at a few schools in the North of the country. We're staying with a charity on the shore of Lake Malawi.

Here are a couple of photos I took last year, when I led a similar project, with the charity:

Lake Malawi Sunrise

Eating sugar cane

We'll be helping them develop their Computer Science curricula and capabilities. We'll be working in various different areas including basic digital literacy skills, how computers work, and programming, but we'll also be looking to help them develop their Computational Thinking through the use of various unplugged activities. Computational Thinking is basically a form of problem-solving where you approach the problem in the same way as a computer scientist would if they were going to look to use a computer to solve the problem.

My home for the next 5 weeks is electricity-free and is about a third of this hut:

Sleeping hut

At least last year I got to see the Unix bike:

The Unix Bike

I have no idea why this bike is named for an Operating System, but as a Computer Scientist I felt the need to record its' existence.