Education and learning in 21st Century in Africa

From the past 10 decades, most fields have really transformed and embraced technology so much. If you compare a car made in the 20s and a modern car, it is clearly evident how fast things have changed. Looking at the medicine field, there has been a big revolution for the better. The change is similar into the electronic, aviation as well as many other sectors that contribute hugely into global economy.  Sadly, unlike many fields, it has been noted by scholars that education remains largely unchanged even with all the technology advancement and the ever-evolving problems in the world that need a different approach to solve them.

I have been a victim of the 8-4-4 system of education in Kenya, which is simply a system that has made most of us believe passing exams is the key to success in life. This is not the case in 21^st century. This system rarely encouraged innovative ways of solving problems. It makes students become so self-centred because they want to beat everyone else in class. This discourages greatly collaborative learning between the students and everyone is actually fine with it because the bright ones have their way always to beat everyone else. This has led to lots of half baked graduates who get a big shock when they realise they learnt very little from their well passed exams that would help them to deal with realistic and real-life problems. These graduates are actually not very useful in solving the society problems because they don’t have the appropriate skills.

My favourite example is a case where in 2015 we ran a survey at AIMS (African Institute of Mathematical Sciences) Tanzania, which is one of the six pan African network of centres of excellence that offer an intensive Masters in Mathematical Sciences. We administered the survey to 54 very bright students from 16 different African countries who were admitted to pursue the Mathematical Science masters with majority having had statistics courses. You would expect that statistics students would have interacted with data and at least a statistical analysis software but to our surprise, more than half had not dealt with data, not even on an spreadsheet. How would these people carry out quality research to solve the current problems? This actually showed that the problem of poor learning methods and education is everywhere.  The education needs to be transformed.

Since time immemorial, teaching and learning is usually in a class, with a teacher impacting knowledge to students. This has been the case for so long. It needs to change. This mode of teaching and learning is ineffective in impacting students with the skills in the 21^st century. Looking at our current problems, learning should be a team effort not just the teacher teaching and the students wanting to outshine others. From my experience, I have found that collaborative learning is the most effective way of learning.

I have been involved with projects that work directly with students across all levels since 2014 and it has been great learning experience for me in understanding how learning should be. These include the CS4HS(Computer Science 4 Highs School program)in 2014,Intel trainings and Google training for students. I have also been involved in outreach activities and recently the Africa Code week. In addition, I have also worked as a volunteer in two annual maths camps that have organised by African Maths initiative.  All these used the unconventional teaching methods and concentrated more on teaching methods like involving the students by using games physical activities and real-life problems.     Among the skills that I strongly believe students need to acquire after this experience are creativity, problem solving skills, collaboration, proper communication skills, digital literacy and critical thinking. It’s not clear how well these are taught in schools.

I strongly believe that, the people who understand this need should be in the front line advocating for a better-quality and transformative education and learning processes to make sure the education systems produce able and sufficiently skilled professionals and leaders for this century.

How SASMU Statistics Boot camp went down

In the quest to promote good statistical practice, Society of Applied Statistics of Maseno University (SASMU) organised a statistics boot camp last week. Among the invited guests was African Maths Initiative (AMI), together with Perfect Research, Kenya Forestry Research Institute, Nyanza Reproductive Organization and many others. The boot camp was a three-day event covering different aspects of statistics (data analysis, data cleaning, statistical packages, data collection) that are vital in learning, understanding and practising statistics. Other invited guests were practising statisticians and data analysts and hence gave the students a glimpse of what happens in the real world and encouraged them to take statistics seriously. One of the key messages was that data has become the new soil of modern society. Statistics is in every field. This means statisticians will never lack opportunities to play an active role in society by practicing their art.

During the first day, AMI had two sessions. One in mid-morning and another in the afternoon. During the first session, Maxwell Fundi gave a presentation about AMI, including an overview of the initiatives AMI is carrying. John Lunalo then introduced the African Data Initiative(ADI) by showing and commenting the campaign video, and facilitating a lively questions and answers session about the project.

In the afternoon, a demonstration of R-Instat was given.  The ADI team started by illustrating the worryingly low statistical literacy of African graduates by the use of a case study conducted in the African Institute of Mathematical Science (AIMS Tz). This institution admits very bright students across Africa with backgrounds in mathematics and statistics. The data showed how many statistics courses AIMS students had taken during their undergraduate studies, if they used datasets, and if they had used a statistics package. Despite the fact most students had taken numerous statistics courses, very few had worked with data or even statistics package. The point being that an open-source software like R-Instat is aiming to fill in such gaps in the statistical empowerment of countries in Africa and worldwide.

The actual demonstration of R-Instat was then performed. Students were guided through different menus and functionalities of the software. Specific tasks such as loading data, dealing with dates and organising data using right clicks on the grid were extensively illustrated. The description capabilities of the software were showed as well, including summaries and graphics production using ggplot2 R package. A last comment about the translation was made.

On the second day, the AMI team offered a session on research methods which was led by Mike and Laetitia. During this session, the attendees were grouped and given datasets to look at. Different types of research questions, and ways to use data to drive answers were discussed. A few groups tried to use R-Instat. The whole team was supporting the students in different aspects including installing R-instat on some machines, commenting on the data analysis and providing general advice. Students showed quick understanding of how to use stats packages and achieved to produce more or less extensive analysis of their data in a rather short period of time. We also supported SPSS and Stata sessions in the afternoon.

On the final day, the groups presented their work and were provided with questions to stimulate their thinking and feedback to improve their presentations and statistical practices. After an interesting presentation of Perfect Research, consultants in Statistical analysis, the country coordinator for the new upcoming group called the Kenya Young Statisticians presented its project to the audience. She emphasised the benefits of initiatives like SAMSUS, in reflexion with the aims of her own organisation. Finally ADI summarized the different steps in data collection, management and treatment covered during the boot camp. The team members shared their work experience with the students and encouraged volunteering work to acquire experience and opportunities in fields of interest.  

How far has African Data Initiative Gone?

Recently, the actual development of the African data initiative project started. I am seeking to look back and see the progress that we have made since the team started actual work and where we are headed to in a few weeks to come before Christmas.

African Data Initiative is the Latest project by the African Maths Initiative (AMI) which seeks to bridge the gap that exists in understanding of statistics. Through AMI works in Africa in partnership with Statistical Service Center, it was clearly evident that there was a problem with learning, understanding and teaching of statistics and hence this initiative came about. This seeks to solve this problem in four easy phases. First phase is building a simple but powerful statistical software to be used in all academic levels.  This software will be a menu driven software but runs the most powerful data analysis software called R.

Second phase will be using the software by the lectures to teach statistics in universities in a simple but concrete way. This will facilitate better learning and understanding of statistics which will in long term facilitate good decision making. Third phase is to have a wide variety of audience by having the software able to be translated to as many languages as possible and finally to use the software in all levels of education to enhance teaching of statistics.

I have never been involved with this kind of a big project before. It is really overwhelming and there is equally as much learning as working. I have the roles of implementing the multilingual capability of the software as well as working on the front end.

Currently, we have managed to achieve a lot. The loading of data to the software, and establishing a link to R from the front end was one of the biggest milestones. We are now able to send commands to R through the menu system. We have quite a good number of dialogs working and most plots in statistics working as well. They are generated in R and the output displayed in R graphics. This has just been achieved in a few weeks and we are working tirelessly to make sure that in less than a years’ time we deliver a complete package.

We will be releasing the alpha release soon, actually in a few weeks from now. This will come before Christmas. It will have all the basic functionalities. The other releases will include beta release as anticipated in February and a final release in June.   

It has an amazing experience to be part of this team. It is really evident from this progress that we have made by now we will be able to deliver this package by June. We greatly appreciate the support from everyone out there. Its through that support we are able to develop this life changing statistical software.

My translations work for African Data Initiative Project

Around the world, more than 95% of the population are not native English speakers. English is learnt by about half of the world's population as their second language. From statistics, we know that more than half of the world’s population is more comfortable with not speaking English. For this reason, it is important  that we develop solutions that are localized to as many as languages as possible to ensure that we cater for the better part of the audience who are not comfortable speaking English.

At African Maths Initiative (AMI), we believe that this is a practice that should be embraced by software and applications developers  in order to get more market and audience for the solutions developed. In the latest project by AMI, the African Data Initiative, we have embraced this method of developing software that has translations capability to many languages.

Among the roles that I have in this project is to ensure that the new statistical package has multilingual capabilities. Within the last two Weeks I have managed to set up tools that will be used in the entire project in implementation of translations. I am using the Multilingual App Toolkit from Microsoft which is a free adon that integrates well with visual studio, the Integrated Development Environment we are using in development of the software.

Currently, we have implemented two languages, Kiswahili and French. Having that the actual development of the software was launched in Tanzania, and most people speak Kiswahili, it was our motivation to translate the software first in Kiswahili, a language spoken by over 100m people across the world. Having no funds to do this, we are still looking into ways that we could implement multilingual crowd-sourcing where we will have people of goodwill and volunteers help in translations to the languages they are most proficient in. We need this also because, the translations we have from the translation provider may not be as accurate as they should be since they are machine translations which are derived from Google Translate.

Apart from this work on multilingual implementation, I also had a lecture at African Institute of Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) in Tanzania, where a colleague at work, John Lunalo and I delivered a lecture on Open Data Kit, a free mobile data collection and management solution. This was an exciting opportunity to teach among the top creams in Africa a new concept. It all went well. We greatly appreciate the opportunity and the AIMS Tanzania administration for granting us that chance.                                                       

                                        

We look forward to incorporating more languages as we go by. It is in our objectives to make sure everyone around the world will be able to use our new statistical software with the language the understand best. this will in turn improve understanding, learning and teaching of statistics.

                              

My involvement with African Data Initiative

African Data Initiative is a project by a young NGO called African Maths Initiative (AMI). AMI is Kenyan NGO formed by mathematicians and mathematics educators who are working to create a stronger mathematical community and culture of mathematics across Africa through fun ways of doing Maths.

Having the African Data Initiative project, which is an open source project to create a new easy to use statistical software, it was necessary to do a campaign to create awareness and get a community of supporters for this project. This was done through crowdfunding, crowd sourcing and also through many other channels including doing presentations, spreading the word on social media, and also through friends to tell a neighbors and other people in their networks.

We had conducted the campaign for 90 days and it proved very difficult to make people understand the need for this software. We actually had gotten a good number of supporters during the time we had the campaign running though not as many as we had anticipated. Recently, after my longest and toughest journey, John Lunalo and I had a chance to present the ideas of AMI and the African Data Initiative students, tutors and lecturers at the African Institute of Mathematical sciences in Bagamoyo Tanzania. Surprisingly enough, people were really impressed by the project and so far we have received more than 50 supporters from that presentation. It was really amazing.

More to that, over this week, we have managed to start the actual development of the statistical package, with many decisions being made and the timeline being set. I am happy to be part of the development team for this software with the role of designing and development of user interfaces. It doesn’t come easy, it’s a challenge everyday with lots of learning but the motivation of carrying on is the potential that this software has in changing the understanding, teaching and learning of statistics across Africa and the rest of the world.  We believe that in one years’ time, we will have the full release of this software.

My Longest and toughest journey I ever had.

Among my major interests is travelling. I have traveled far and wide but this was an extreme travelling.

Recently, we were scheduled to leave Maseno in western Kenya for Bagamoyo, a small town in eastern Tanzania, a distance of about 1,188 Kms to go and meet up with other African Data Initiative developers at AIMS Tanzania. This started as an excitement, having thought it would be a fun travel all the way and having the great passion to develop this life changing software.

We left Maseno at around 20:30hrs on Wednesday the 7^th October 2015 for Nairobi. This is an eight hour journey by bus which we are all used to and it just another piece of cake. With less than 2hours of rest, we took the Dar express at 06:15hrs the following day and headed towards Dar es Salaam. It was anticipated we would arrive at Dar es Salaam at around 22:00 hrs. the same day.

Happy and excited, we left the capital and headed for the Kenya-Tanzania border which was just a two hour drive. We handled the normal immigration bureaucracy and proceeded with our journey.

Getting to Tanzania, a large vast land of dry area was what met the eye for more than twelve hours of travel. It was not interesting at all. We traveled the whole day with less than an hour of rest and safely arrived at Dar at 21:30hrs. We were extremely tired and a thought of boarding a taxi to Bagamoyo for another one hour was not happily welcomed. This is due the accumulated exhaustion for more than 25 hours journey. The “short” trip to Bagamoyo from Dar was rather quiet, no one spoke to each other till we got to the hotel. Everyone was tired sleepy and nothing seemed interesting. Hurriedly, after checking in the hotel, i took a shower and slept.  

After such a long, tiring and exhausting journey, we had to leave hotel by 10:00 hrs the next on day, for AIMS for work: initial meet up with the AIMS development team. Sadly, the only lady in the team fell ill and was rushed to hospital. The rest of us had to meet and discuss progress of African Data Initiative Project. We met on Saturday again and unfortunately, I fell sick and had to seek medical attention. I'm happy we are both well now and working hard on the African Data Initiative. Thanks to everyone who donated for the success of this life changing project.

This was the longest journey and the toughest I ever had. All the same I'm happy to have experienced this since it's my sacrifice to facilitate development of Africa by better understanding of data through making this new statistical software which will help in making statistics easier. I don’t regret it but I would love to travel back differently.

The trending digital era for kids

Technology development and advancement has for long not considered the fact that there is always a group of next techies. The kids. For long enough, the kids generation- “Generation next”- has always met the computing technologies either in High schools or the universities. This led to a gap in the society since every programmer wanted to develop the complex and sophisticated Information systems and software forgetting the easy and fun things they could develop to help kids have fun.

it takes a kid a small either mobile app that says meow or a website that has animations of different cartoons to have fun and enjoy. This is one way that kids are getting involved with current trending digital era.Developing for kids is one thing that has now hit the market of kid games and apps. This is because it doesn’t take too much programming knowledge to develop cool kids apps. There exists soft wares that help in design and building of amazing apps without writing a thousand and one lines of code. One such tool is Construct2.

Construct2 is a simplified development environment that enable you create nice games within a short time as compared to other programming languages. Game apps developed in Construct2 could be ported to different platforms including Android and web based platforms. Further, to enable you build for even much more platforms, it’s really possible to import construct2 files to the amazing Intel IDE called Intel XDK which enables you build HTML5 code to multiple platforms. This is done online through their dedicated build servers.

Now that this kind of development is possible, it’s been shown time and time again that this could be used to develop fun learning apps which improve the thinking capacity of a kid. This goes a long way in creating the “unfindable jobs” as well taking technology in the next level. This in turn leads to a countries development since it banks on both the kids and the current developers.

More to this, there has been a need to introduce kids to programming, so that they could be able to create and develop all their imaginations to reality. This has been made possible by use of other even simpler development environments which enable kids understand logic and come up with amazing creations of their own. One of the most popular of these is Scratch, which was developed in MIT.

It is evident that this field that relate to kids and tech is gradually taking shape in Africa. Personally, I have taken the initiative to teach kids programming using these tools. Starting from Maseno Maths Camp 2015, where I delivered programming sessions on scratch, I am on the frontline in support of sharing this content to other people who will in turn I believe, teach others. Having this chain of sharing knowledge, I am confident and really certain that in a couple of years we will have the type of computer gurus we always want.

A simple advice for fellow programmers out there, next time you think of developing software, take time and think about the potential that exists in developing for kids.