Update on Beyond Boxes!
As to be expected, my coursework at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health has been intense, so I apologize for the long delay in posting. I thought it might be nice to share some news from my most recent visit to our community partners in Northern Uganda about the results of my Master's project and my team's D-Lab project (this was my third trip to the region in the past year, so I'm settling back in now).
"Field Update on July 4 from Adjumani District, Uganda: We are grateful to be having face-to-face time with our partner school! This past week, we held initial meetings with the head teachers and nearly 20 other faculty and staff at the school to learn more about their interests and plan the project together. As you can imagine, we had to make several adjustments based on new information on the ground. We also had a chance to visit the nearby markets to see what types of materials and lighting products are locally available, picking up some waste along the way to use for prototyping.
Then we headed to the Tet innovation center in Pader District to co-design and build enough kits of hands-on learning materials for 180 students to explore the topic of basic circuitry and lighting. We learned so much during this process and faced firsthand some of the challenges of turning a prototype into a mass-produced product. While in the Pader District, we also had the opportunity to visit a rural D-Lab partner community, Amokolagwai, to see how one of the capacity building projects there has progressed. The Beyond Boxes project, which started off with reusing packaging materials to create more learning and skills building opportunities, has evolved so much over this past year! Having started with people making practice designs of bags from materials like paper and cardboard back in June 2015, the community members eventually transitioned to making bags that they could sell from scrap materials like tablecloths, and now they have earned enough to get a sewing machine for the technology group and are making beautiful bags to generate more income (pictured below). I'm so proud of their work, and inspired by how far people have taken the ideas from this project.
Upon our return to Adjumani, we were able to show the newly constructed hands-on learning kits and updated curricula at the school to get more feedback. Over the weekend, we worked with the focal teachers for this project to train 18 student leaders to teach their peers about circuitry and lighting. We have been impressed that so many of the student leaders are female, considering there are far fewer female students in late primary school here, and grateful that this group was willing to come on a weekend to move the project forward. We're really excited to see them all in action this week, introducing the other 162 students in their class to the hands-on learning kits! The plan for the rest of this week is to test and get feedback on the curricular materials, as well as gauge interest for and explore the feasibility of starting a design club at the school, so more students and teachers will have the opportunity to keep exploring this type of learning. For today, the D-Lab students will continue class observations and home visits to better understand the context in preparation for testing the curricula, kits and design club idea."
To read more about this fieldwork trip, please see my D-Lab students' blog post here:
