ADA Funding

As already announced on the ICT4D.at blog, after our application in March we received funding from the Austrian Development Cooperation for Zanzicode – and of course we are very happy!

The funding amounts to 5000€ of our 9100€ budget. Therefore the funded period reaches from April 2010 to April 2010. The main items of expenditure are the salary of our teacher Salum, the purchase of new furniture and workstations and the monthly rent and electricity.

The course is already in full flow and our students are doing great. We have had some problems in getting pictures from our students so far, but we’re positive that we’ll be getting up more content soon. Amongst others we are currently working on a promotional video featuring interviews of local people. So make sure to check out our blog frequently.

Application for the ADA micro-project grant

To be able to carry on with our project for the coming year and to put it on solid feet for the long term, our mother organisation ICT4D.at has applied for the micro-project grant of the Austrian Development Agency (ADA) now. Our partner in this undertaking is the local organisation Aidnet Zanzibar, which has extensive experience in working together with foreign NGOs.

Amongst other things, the grant should enable us to set up a decent teaching environment – locally produced furniture and appropriate devices. With this investment we cover the one-time costs of our course and are able to carry on teaching for a while with minimum recurring costs.

We hope that we will receive the grant – to carry on providing quality web-programming education and media literacy in general for a growing local market.

Applications for the Zanzicode class of 2010

A few days ago, on Thursday, December the 10th, we ended the first phase of our application process for the class of 2010. All in all, there have been 35 applications – 14 by the current Zanzibits graduates, and 21 by otherwise interested youth, who had heard about us by word of mouth. When handing in their application forms, our aspiring students had a chance to find out more about what we actually do at Zanzicode and thus to prepare for the personal interviews that are going to take place next week.

For the 19 non-Zanzibits people, applying also meant registering for a written “exam” on the following Friday. In a 6-page questionnaire, we asked about motivation, personal resources and social background. We also had some not-so-easy questions about prior knowledge of computers and the internet just to make sure everybody has the required basics. Here are some pictures of our applicants during the test:

The results of these exams will help us decide who we want to invite for the personal interviews next week, where we will have to further narrow down the group of applicants to a final 8 to 12 people. Let’s see how it goes!

Our First Ever Graduation

This friday was the final of teaching for the Zanzicode class of 2009 and after almost half a year of studying, everybody finally got their graduation certificate. Here’s a picture of our proud graduates – from left to right this is Salum, Othman, Said and Bilal.

Congratulation, guys!, and thanks to everybody – students, lecturers, organisation and local supporters for their efforts during the last 6 months.

Preparations, preparations, preparations

Since the continuation of of our efforts in Zanzibar has been decided a couple of weeks ago, we’ve been working hard to organise and prepare for the classes of 2010. Here’s a list of some of things that kept us busy lately:

Classroom and Teaching-related:

• Rent a classroom at Al-Riyami School.
• Have the power lines rewired to use Zanzibits’ powermeter and UPS.
• Have the room painted, it’s a mess!
• Rent furniture for the class of 2009 until we get our own (see next item).
• Find a cheap, skilled and reliable carpenter; order tables and chairs.
• Get shutters for our windows to keep out the noise, dust, rain and heat.
• Find a cheap second-hand projector in Europe (thanks, Carina!).
• Find suitable computer hardware. We had a look at inveneo.org and ncomputing.com, but we think we’ll go with some more of those cheap laptops instead.
• Test all available options for high-speed internet (result: both suck).

Going public:

• Spread the word to the streets to find students for 2010.
• Organize an application process for interested students: application exam, personal interviews.
• Create a simple website at zanzicode.com.
• Start a blog at zanzicode.com/blog (you’re reading it!).
• Put some pictures online at zanzicode.com/photos.

Organisational:

• Do a lot of boring budgeting work; most importantly have a proper estimation of the one-off preparational costs (which turned out to be more than we expected) and the monthly recurring costs for 2010 (which turned out to be less than we expected).
• Find a good way to  handle money transfers from Austria to Zanzibar.
• … and do a thousand more small errands: create certificates for the 2009 graduates, get a rubber stamp with the all new Zanzicode logo, find whiteboards, …

It’s not very hard work, but it’s still tiring, because everything needs a lot of personal interaction and therefore, time and effort. In case you plan to start a project in Zanzibar, my tip (which is doubtlessly biased and based only on my personal experience) is to not want too much in too little time, at least in the beginning. Better take it easy until you find the right people to work with, and even then, don’t push too hard: it will happen, just not in the way you thought it will, or in the time, or at the agreed price — but it will. Hakuna matata :-)

best, Fritz Grabo

ps: here are some pictures from our “Classrooms Preparations” Set on flickr to illustrate our current work. We’ll add more pictures to the set during the next 2 weeks!

Improvements

As I wrote in the previous post, our first class was okay as it was and for what it could have been, but surely it has potential for improvement. In short, here is what we think we can do better next time, and how:

Make sure all students are at the same level, regarding their prior knowledge of computers and the web. This time, we not only have personal interviews with applicants for our classes, we also have a written exam before those interviews to see if they have a good idea of how to work with computers and the web and to see if they know how to write HTML and CSS by hand. If someone is not exactly fluent in web technologies, but has the right resources and motivation to go for it, it’s not a problem: before we start regular classes in march, we have two months of compulsory introductory courses for everyone who needs them.

Have more students. The class of 2009 had only five students, and compared to the effort we put into the project, it’s sad to see that the output is not exactly huge in terms of people benefiting from it. For 2010, we’ve got more time to find fitting students and a new, bigger classroom suitable for 12 or even more students. Also, we believe that having more students actually makes teaching (and learning!) easier, as it will help us to do classic, regular, lecturer-centered teaching. Wait, this is a good thing? I hear my fellow lecturers in Austria screaming… With my tiny group of students, it was just too easy to be tangled up in private discussions. I’m sure this was mostly my fault, because I was taking it too easy sometimes. And as a lecturer, I should know that if I take it easy, the students will take it easy, too – especially so in Zanzibar ;)

Check students’ performance frequently. This could happen in the form of assignments, private project work with feedback sessions, or even bi-weekly exams. Our students should know that even though our education is offered free of charge, it does not mean that they don’t have to work for it. If necessary, we let single students go instead of having them slow down the others. Sounds though, I know. And it should be.

Have a local person as a lecturer. Every now and then, when it was just too hard to explain a difficult concept, the students would stop me for a minute and discuss it among themselves in their own language, Swahili. We don’t think it’s a good idea to switch from English to Swahili alltogether, but having a native speaker for the tricky parts sure will help. This, too, is why we’re very fortunate to have Salum Rashid, one of the graduates of our class of 2009, to work with us as a lecturer in 2010.

All in all, we hope these changes will help us to improve the quality of teaching and increase the number of students benefiting from our efforts. We’ll keep you updated on how it goes!

Fritz Grabo

Hello World!

The first round of the Zanzicode project draws to a close and we learned a lot. It’s fair to say that not everything was working perfectly all of the time, but then again, what is? ;-)

Most importantly, we have been able to confirm that the idea behind our project – to provide free education in Web Development to small number of selected students – is valid. There is both talent and demand for professional web work in Zanzibar, and we’re happy to help build personal careers and to further add to the local webdev scene by prolonging the project for another year in 2010.

The story so far: when Martin Konzett of ICT4D.at has been introduced to the Zanzibits School for Film and Multimedia during a visit to Zanzibar, he decided to support the project by organising an advanced class in the field of Web Development for Zanzibits graduates and otherwise fitting students. In July 2009, Dan Hamm came to Zanzibar as the first of three teachers and held seven weeks of introductory lectures. We’re very thankful to the Zanzibits team, who provided us with a room and hardware during the time – asante sana, rafikis!

We had a short drawback when Stefan Asseg, our second teacher, was unable to follow Dan’s lead due to an unfortunate sporting accident that happened only a few days before his planned departure. Luckily, as a part time university teacher and full time procrastinating student, I had a bit of free time during the summer to step in, giving “remote support” from Austria via Skype. This way, we have been able to keep the classes going before I came down to Zanzibar myself at the end of September as the third and final teacher.

It’s now two weeks before the end of the regular classes, and I think the project was a success so far. Sure, we had to downshift the speed of teaching a good bit (pole pole!) due to various reasons and hence did not accomplish to cover the whole of the planned curriculum – however, we succeeded to give most of our students a very good understanding of the basics of web development and I’m sure everybody is now able to keep on learning by himself. Also, we are thinking about ways to further support our graduates, so stay tuned for that.

Regarding ourselves, we also learned a lot and identified a number of issues that we will take proper care of during our preparations for Zanzicode 2010 – but hey, that’s another post :-)

best, Fritz Grabo