Although the numbers have gone down, we think there is an overall feeling of “good” in the classroom – at some points, we were really trying to connect to the students, but were unable to, but, especially after this week and after we split them up, we think the teachers and students have really come to an understanding, and we are all appreciating one another.  They filled the evaluations out on Monday, before we handed back the exams, and discussed the splitting up.  So we will be able to compare the results to how they feel after the split up.  We will give two more course evaluations, one on Tuesday July 13 and a final course evaluation on Thursday July 15.

4 Entrepreneurship Course

In general, Lauri and Ato have been alternating when teaching the entrepreneurship lectures. This has been working out quite well. It allows the remaining G-Unit members to deal with issues related to the Java course, such as making copies, finalizing quizzes and exams, grading papers, etc.

Monday’s teacher evaluation form showed that many students are still satisfied with the entrepreneurship course. The guest speakers have been the true highlight of the course, since they have all been lively and added flare to the course that many didn’t expect. Students generally think that the lectures have been relevant and understandable; although a small group disagrees (we don’t know the reason yet).

We have now completed four lectures, and had three speakers. Yesterday’s speaker was a founder of Africa Online, and came to talk about his values as an entrepreneur. It turns out that he is not too involved in entrepreneurship (regardless of the title), so his comments were much less spiced with experience in comparison to the previous two speakers. It’s worth being more careful to check the background of the speakers. 

Our one big problem has been the homework. The evaluation forms showed a lot of negative feelings toward the homework, especially the group assignments. In short, we think assigning group projects like writing a business plan with people you don’t know was a bad idea. It’s not possible for the students to complete it. Students do not have a chance to meet outside of the classroom, and all the time spent here goes into lab work so they can’t do it then either. Personal assignments have been more popular, but some also think that they do not force them to reflect enough or the assignments are not interesting enough. For the sake of improving next year’s experience, we’ll ask for specific comments and suggestions from students to understand what they would have liked to see. 

In response to the homework issue, we cut out one group assignment that required a written draft from the group and instead added a discussion about outsourcing in Ghana. We’ve also introduced the personal business plan assignment, and told students it is a requirement for passing the course (whereas normal homework counts towards your grade but you can receive a few zeros and still pass). We expect mixed results from the business plans, since some students clearly joined the course in the hopes of learning valuable entrepreneurship skills and others simply want a certificate that shows computer aptitude. Perhaps next week we will devise some rules for quality control so that all students will hand in something that is worth reading and helps them understand what a business plan is.

5 Mindstorms

The Lego classes took a slight downturn this week, because one of our schools did not come to class. On Monday, the Accra Girls had tests that prevented them from coming, which they told us about beforehand. Then on Wednesday they missed again without informing us, and later said it was again because of exams. We called them on Friday to tell them that they need to come to class if they want to continue, so they instead opted to quit. The program was simply taking too much of the girls’ time, and their response was expected.

There are two major issues to talk about:

1. Some students are getting tired of building legos. This was expected. Not everyone finds legos interesting beyond the initial hype, and only those students who show a clear interest in engineering have kept excelling in the program. Students have taken part in five three-hour sessions (the Accra Girls took part in three), and the split-up between characters is now clear. The case of the Accra Girls proves the point. 
2. There are too many students per team. Three students currently work on one robot, and that was ok for the first few lessons. In the earlier lessons, students all had a lot to learn and working in large teams was actually fun. But now that the groups have to build a robot of their own design, it usually ends up being one (maybe two) people building while the rest play games, do homework, or fool around. This was also expected, because it is hard to have more than one person work on a robot at a time. Lego robots are small, and meant to be built by as few as one person. Only the more successful teams manage to divide the workload into units that can be constructed simultaneously.

 Next Monday will be our last session for the initial group. We hope to wrap up what we learned, and explain to the students how their teams performed. But, we have then decided to take the sets away from everyone that wants to quit (e.g. the Accra Girls), and reallocate sets to a smaller number of motivated students. The program will continue for another week with only the best students, and each student should now work in a team of one or two.

Here’s also how we plan to improve the atmosphere of the class when we have selected the most motivated students:

1.      We need a more competitive atmosphere. The students chose to not work hard when the goals of the program were completely open-ended and there was no evaluation that would lead to a certificate. Also, we did not come up with prizes for any of the competitions, but instead expected the school spirit to carry teams forward (since we had three closely competitive schools participating). Next week, we will try to give the students something more to work with. Enjoyable prizes, however small, will be a good addition and will help the students motivate themselves to learn.

2.      We will give clear instructions for what we expect in class. No playing games, and no “dead reckoning” robots that can be made in two minutes. We will be critical in analyzing each robot, pointing out weaknesses/mistakes that the students themselves don’t recognize. We have already done this with the course, but we hope to be more active next week. The benefit of letting students work freely is that they learn to fix their own mistakes, but we could still give more critical advice.

Overall, there are students who are very pleased with the course, and many are learning a lot. Lego robots are a cool idea, and the teachers that accompany the students to the class have all wanted to buy sets for their schools. The program has simply been too rigorous for some, and that should be considered next time this kind of program is run.

6  Visiting High schools

Doing the high school info-sessions haven’t been walks in the park. We are kind of understaffed so finding people to do them has been little bit difficult. We have entrepreneurship on Tuesdays and Thursdays as well as Lego MindStorms on Mondays and Wednesdays and on these days we also have to grade labs. We are hoping that at the tail end of the course when the students warrant less help we can do some sessions and be freer in the afternoons. Friday is the set date for the high school sessions. We have had one info session so far at Presec which run for an hour. It went well, took off a little late due to the late assembly of students and run smoothly. It ended up being to much tailored towards MIT, it became a selling of MIT to potential applicants as opposed to general information on applying to American schools. We think it went well. Ato has two others lined up for the next two weeks and still planning two more. Aisha is working on the graduate school session which has been lined up for July 17^th. We are working on the fly and basically the demand is bigger than the supply.

 
7 Publicity

Ato has called up a newspaper corporation and is in the process of securing a journalist for a news story. The radio interview idea is up in the air but not up in smoke. Ato has not been able to fix a good time yet because our program starts at 9am, just around the time such interviews are given on radio. Ato is looking into afternoon programs. It has been quite difficult trying to find time to continuously contact the journalists, but don’t worry we will take care of it before our time is up.

 
8 Ghana 2004 Travel

Last week, we went to Cape Coast.  Ato organized a trip with a travel agent who provided a huge van for the five of us for the entire weekend.  The hotel had free breakfast and free dinners, and it was a very nice place.  It wound up costing $590 for all five of us to spend 3 days and 2 nights at the coast.  We had a great time there – the first day we went to visit Elmina Castle and Cape Coast Castle, a very humbling experience.  The next day we went on the canopy walks.  They were exciting.  We also visited a few markets in the area and the boys bought Ghanaian clothing J  (We tried using internet there too to send the reports, but it was so slow and unreliable [aka we couldn’t even access email])

 The trip to Kimasi was wonderful. We truly enjoyed hanging out with Ato’s family. His parents are so nice and made us feel completely at home. Ato’s brother took an exeat (exit) from his school so that he could hang out with us to for the weekend. We arrived Friday night around 9pm and Ato’s father was already waiting for us. We went to Ato’s house for dinner then to our hotel Amashairo which was about 10 minutes away. A few of the AITI members went out to a club called Foxtrap. The next day we had breakfast at Ato’s house and went to the Hospital, the Kumasi Zoo, the market place, and then back to Ato’s house for a late lunch. Then we went to our hotel to rest up and get ready for a Saturday night on the town. Then on Sunday we had breakfast at our hotel and then went to the beautiful lake Bosomtwe before we headed back to the bus station. We arrived back in Accra around 9pm on Sunday night.

 
9 Our Questions to the AITI Alumni

We have a few major questions.

1)      The final project: we believe that a final project in JSP may not be adequate for testing a student’s knowledge of Java. Do you have any thoughts or suggestions? Are there any example project descriptions from AITI in the previous years?

2)    Students not doing well in the course: There are about 10-15 students that are not doing well in the course. These are the students that failed Exam 1 as well as the make-up exam for exam 1. We were thinking that students that score 60 and below would not receive a certificate for the MIT-AITI course.

3)      Reports: We are a bit unclear about what is required in each weekly report and in the final report. Are there any samples from AITI in the past years?

 
10 Overall Thoughts and Observations

• We have been burning a lot of CDs, about one for each student with the general java software including J2sdk, JCreator IDE, Java API
• We have been very fortunate to have AITI Ghana 2002 student alumni helping us out for a few hours everyday. His name is Kwadwo Diabene Agyire-Tettey, and was in the AITI 2002 Java class at PreSec. He is truly an incredible and critical part of the AITI team.