Rural Kenyan students a’Twitter thanks to UCC
5/7/2009
Even after using Google for years, its power still boggles the mind. So, imagine how a class of students with threadbare blackboards in rural Kenya felt when they laid eyes on the Internet for the first time.
Thanks to a groundbreaking UCC service trip over March Break, four UCC students visited Ntugi Day Secondary School in Lewa Downs, Kenya equipped with durable OLPC laptops, solar panels, and battery-operated portable wireless routers — a kit which they’d spent a full year researching, assembling and testing themselves.
“Some of the Ntugi students wanted to research ethane gas, but their textbook only had two lines on the subject,” says Mark Battley, trip superviser and UCC’s head of digital media. “When we showed the students the 128,000 Google search results on the topic, it was like a bomb went off.”
In just two weeks, the UCC students left the school with the computers, power, and sustainable, affordable Internet access. The icing on the cake? Nothing less than rural Kenya’s first Twitter account!
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Read more about how UCC students used CradlePoint technology to bring the internet to a remote Kenyan school.
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