2016 ICT4D Conference

Engineering tools are crucial to individuals and communities charting their own development paths. However, engineering curricula are often inaccessible except via elite formal education. Digital learning platforms delivered on one-to-one devices afford students in low-resource settings with opportunities to engage with interactive content, receive immediate feedback on formative assessments, and view complex phenomenon. Educational technology serves as a scaffold for students to learn and apply it immediately in their communities. In our ongoing study, we combine a novel tablet platform, blended classroom structure, and hands-on activities to deliver an innovative engineering curriculum for pre-college students. We develop and assess this curriculum for former "street youth" at a residential school in western Kenya. The curriculum integrates science and engineering concepts applied to real problems the students identify around them, and the technology serves as a vehicle and a tool for students to access engaging content. Further, the tablet platform serves as an engineering tool itself for students to see simulations of real phenomena, employ the tablet as a "lab notebook" for observations and concept sketches, and take measurements using various sensors and programs under development. We present pilot data from the beginning of our deployment of this curriculum as well as a description of the backward design process and our model of experiential engineering education.