By Silvia Kist
During the school holiday in July 2009 in Rwanda, students and teachers from Nonko, Rwamagana and Kagugu Primary Schools returned to their classrooms for a week to participate in Rwanda’s first XO Camp.
The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) Learning Team designed the XO Camp with help from the Rwandan RITC Core Team. The goals of the XO Camp is to give students the opportunity to work on something fun that they would not be able to work on during school and to continue capacity building for teachers. The XO Camp, within the basis of rich learning activity, is designed to provide an example of interesting and challenging things that can be done with laptops and to create a vision of powerful uses of computers for teachers and school managers.
These rich learning activities relate to the growth model that OLPC and the Government of Rwanda are building for the laptop initiative in Rwanda. In this growth model, it is important to create powerful exemplars, which are centers of innovation and reflection about laptops and learning. The enthusiasm and the lessons learned in these centers are used to spread the transformation across the school system (see David Cavallo’s paper, Models of Growth: Towards Fundamental change in learning environments).
We have had 3 XO Camps that ran simultaneously at the primary schools: Matsiko Project, Newspaper and Game Programming. We are spotlighting the Matsiko Project in this entry. The Matsiko Project was created to introduce a different approach of the way the learning happens. The idea behind the Matsiko Project is to offer an opportunity for a group of students to express their curiosities about the world and to conduct investigations about subjects that are meaningful to them.
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