| Do you want to learn, or pass exams? There is actually a difference, and this cool tech tries to achieve bo |
| Posted by: Susan Einhorn |
| Many African government have mulled the idea of providing primary school pupils with laptops, and some have actually managed to roll them out - Rwanda’s One Laptop Per Child project has seen over 200,000 laptops distributed to primary school pupils, making it the third largest deployment of laptops to schools globally after Peru and Uruguay. But the results on learning outcomes has been mixed. One study from Peru showed no improvement on test scores in mathematics or languages, and no effect on attendance, time allocated to school activities or quality of instruction in class. But they did improve students’ cognitive skills; that is, the ability to learn – skills like reasoning, perception and attention. The setback was, because students tend to learn faster than teachers, especially when it comes to using gadgets, most teachers had turned the laptops into nothing more than digital notebooks – used only to copy what the teacher had written on the board. But one team from IBM Research-Africa in Nairobi is tinkering with a way to deliver ultra-personalised learning to students, that bridges that gap between traditional classroom learning delivered by a human teacher, and outside classroom learning delivered by an automated tutor on a tablet. |
| Source: Mail & Guardian Africa (Kenya) | Published: July 21st, 2015 |
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