To the cyber-dojo Foundation,
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I wanted to share some positive news with you in these challenging times and an update on the important impact that your support of the Turing Trust is having. I am delighted to let you know that we have sent a further 1,600 PCs to Malawi. This is the largest shipment that we have ever sent to Malawi and it will go a long way to helping thousands more students access a digitally enabled education. Your donation enabled us to refurbish an additional 300 PCs that went into our recent shipment. Thank you again for your support that is fundamental to making our work possible as we get closer to realising our vision of a world where everyone has access to a technology-enabled education. Over the last few years, we have made tremendous progress, particularly in Malawi, where our projects have focused in the Northern Region of the country. Here we have increased the percentage of secondary schools that have computer labs from just 2% up to 32% by the end of 2019. You can see some of this progress on our interactive map showing the locations of these 63 schools as well as photos from each on our website. With your continuing support we believe that we can provide adequate computing facilities to every secondary school in Malawi by 2025. |
We have also started a pilot programme working with primary schools. To date we have installed seven computer labs in primary schools. Each has 20 Mac Mini Computers running Linux Mint and loaded with educational resources using RACHEL. These computers have been received with great enthusiasm and are already having an impact on the way children are learning.
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This initiative has made computer literacy a faster process whereby we can see children as young as four being able to name the parts of a computer and showing great mouse control. Nazir Quareshy, Headmaster for Bloom Junior Academy |
It is a long unfulfilled dream achieved overnight. The board, teachers, members of staff and learners are all excited with the installation of computers at our school. They will enable us offer computer lessons but also be an important resource for teaching and learning. Keston Ndhlovu, School Adminstrator of Ekwendeni Church of Christ Primary School |
In other good news, I am pleased to update you on our progress since we were accepted to be the first Growth Leader for the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Code Club International by the Raspberry Pi CEO Philip Colligan. Our first Code Club has been established at Robert Laws Secondary School in the Mzimba District, Malawi. The club currently has 28 members who have completed courses in SCRATCH and HTML with a couple of students learning C++ as well. You can hear the students talking about their experiences in Code Club in this video.
Thank you so much for your support of The Turing Trust that is vital in enabling us to make such an impact.
Yours sincerely, James Turing