The Tech In Education 48 hour hackathon will commence today by 5pm at the Co-Creation Hub facility, Sabo Yaba, Lagos. It’s been a great build up from the initial meetup last year to this point where it has finally come down to six ideas, six teams and 48 hours within which to create a tech product/solution that can help advance education in Nigeria, especially at the primary and secondary school levels. If you aren’t familiar with the initiative, here’s a quick word from the organisers -
Tech-In Education is an unusual event focusing on technology innovation and application to improve learning amongst primary and secondary school students in Nigeria.
The 48hr experiment will gather geeks and designers with teachers, educationists, parents and stakeholders from different walks of life to co-create novel web and mobile based solution aimed at improving learning amongst primary and secondary school students in Nigeria. Tech-In is not a talk-shop but a living lab where contextualized cool solutions are birthed.
The Tech-In team have been collecting ideas since January, and out of all the ideas that were submitted, here are the six that were shortlisted and will become the projects around which six teams will be formed.
1. GENIUS QUIZ GAME: an interactive, fun, and cheap quiz system developed locally with the collaboration of school teachers given to students at the beginning of the terms (or end of terms), containing 5,000 quiz on subject to be learned (or learned).
2. Pronunciation Buddy: A colourful application that would aid little children learn the correct pronunciation of words.
3. TWIK (Teaching What I Know): a mobile/Web application that has contents created by students themselves, that allows students to teach and share what they know about a particular subject or topic of their choice.
4. Scrabble in Schools initiative (SiSi): taking scrabble board game (electronic version) to schools (primary and secondary) as a mind building, vocabulary enhacing and logic skills improvement tool.
5. Genii Games: Educative software games that combine animation, sounds,videos, games, graphics and text to teach subjects that are directly relevant to the Nigerian people specifically Social and Civic Studies.
6. Teacher Training Online: Learning communities for school-based, in-service Teachers’ Training Enabled by mobile technology.
Ideas number 2 and 6 were contributed by two of my buddies, way to go guys!
I’m really excited about the great ideas for Nigerian education that will come out of this exercise. Sadly, my schedule has made it unlikely that I’ll be able to attend. I’m still holding out hope that I can though, you never know.
And so it begins. Let’s hope that Tech In Education can bring about the disruption that Nigeria’s education sector so desperately needs.
