Transforming Tanzanian schools with Technology

Maths performance is low across Tanzania for many reasons – many schools do not have any qualified maths teachers and instead rely on temporary untrained school leavers to teach classes.  As they have often themselves missed out on a good education, the cycle of poor performance goes on.  Low maths performance pulls down students overall results and ruins their chances of progression to the next academic level.

Digital learning offers huge potential to raise the attainment of these students.  We have so far put in small, battery operated Raspberry Pi computers with an enormous range of downloaded content on into 10 schools.  This content is called RACHEL – Remote Area Community Hotspot for Education and Learning – and enables students without the internet to access world class educational materials such as Wikipedia, Khan Academy, TED talks and much more. 

We have set up a project whereby each school sets up a digital group of students who use the RACHEL maths resources three times a week, and a control group that uses books only.  They are tested at the start of the programme and after 6 months, then the groups change over.  We will be analysing the results carefully to measure the impact of these resources.

We have only managed to fund a very small number of devices for the students to access the resources on so far, but these are supplemented by the use of teachers’ own laptops and smartphones. Students share 1 device between 4 or 5 students.

However it is already clear that students and teachers love the new resources.  Grace, 15, says “I used to struggle with quadratic equations and never understand them, but after watching these videos it finally makes sense!  Now I am confident I can pass my exam and become a doctor”.   Mr Mahenge, her temporary teacher adds “many students were not motivated by maths and had given up.  Having the pi computer has made them like maths much more and now they are working hard.  God willing now they will succeed and we thank everyone who has contributed to this project.