More than a year ago we started with the support of SEEED Studio and David Li in China our hacker space at the Villa Janwaar – but then it somehow lost momentum. Now Anil is re-connected with SEEED and is trying to re-start the initiative. He has written a little report on the activities they’ve done as a basis for the re-start. Please read what Anil had to say:
ANIL’s BRIEF REPORT
We do our sessions in the community center where we have all the required gadgets. When I was taking sessions on hacker space around 15 to 20 kids were coming and sometimes there were more. These kids are from our village called Janwaar which is in the heart of India in Madhya Pradesh, in Panna district. There are around 2,000 people living in the village. All kids belong from Adiwasi and Yadav caste and of course from poor families. In our village we have a government school until 8th grade. In the morning they help in completing house chores and at 10 am they go to school. They have different sessions at our community center in their lunch time so they attend it after their lunch time and they stay at school until 4 pm.
After school they again help in completing the house chores and they try to get it done as soon as they can because they love to skateboard. The kids come back at 6 pm from the skatepark and they also help in cooking the food. After that they do their homework and then go to bed.
I take computer sessions in order to make the kids familiar with the computer. I do it in a way that is interesting for them and easy to learn. They play various games from which they get to learn something like – maths, English alphabet that smaller kids learn from the games. My adjective has always been that whatever I know I could pass on my learning to the other kids in the best way that I can. The outcome is that the kids now know how to attend a meeting and they attend their online sessions by themselves. They are learning computers by playing as they don’t have to take an exam but I make sure that they understand what they do so I take small tests on it where I ask them to do some tasks, short-cuts etc.
My reflection of using Seeed’s product was great. It was really good but as I was not familiar and couldn’t use all the gadgets it was bad. The happy thing was that the kids really enjoyed working with the car and glint kit and we figured out how to run it. As we were not able to use various other stuff we would like to learn about them if possible and if there is something that you think would be great for the kids, community or for the village will be really great.
In the future I would like to learn together with the kids about the gadgets and then we all can think what else we can do with them. It would be great if we, the kids, get introduced to them and learn about their functions only then I think we could make something really good output which can be anything. This is the one thing that I as a kid thinks and if you have any suggestions you can also help us.
