This is the computer lab I built in Malawi, Africa. The school is called BeeHive, this is their website. http://www.beehiveschool.com/

In the video you see Niall, the school’s head teacher (Principal/Headmaster) opening the door and showing off what we built together.

In the coming weeks I’ll be preparing a technical presentation to submit to local Education and Open Source software groups to speak at. Some technical notes.

The Hardware:

HP Chromebook 14 (Model: FALCO)

Raspberry Pi w/ 64GB SD Card

Buffalo Wifi Access Point & Router

The Software:

Edubuntu with custom packages on the Chromebooks

Project RACHEL on the Raspberry Pi to provide local Wikipedia & Educational Content

DD-WRT on the Access Point to finely control radios, and network bandwidth

Challenges:

How to provide a high quality experience?

How to keep the projects affordable?

How do we move that many laptops?

How can this project be sustainable?

What is the best way to expose grade school children to this level of technolgy?

How to we protect from theft?

How do we ration bandwidth when it costs from $12.50 to $4.50/gigabyte ?

I’d love to do this more in the future. I find volunteer work very fulfilling and enriching. The complex and challenging circumstances help me keep my mind sharp. For example, how do you fix something when you have no internet. Answer, it is very hard as you would have had to anticipate and mitigate that kind of problem before it happens.

This and more will be in my future presentation. Also coming soon is a small fundraiser to support my first volunteer project, Olancho Aid in Honduras. Keep an eye out for that.

-Izzy