This school began operation in the 1980s, established by the Bukenya family, who continue to support the school today with the help of Mwebaza Foundation. Around 2008, Mwebaza Infant Primary School began to receive support from the Mwebaza Foundation, based in Colorado, USA. Today the foundation and the school share the same name, which means “gratitude” in the Luganda language. More about Mwebaza Infant Primary School.
Due to failing buildings and overcrowding at the school, Mwebaza Foundation partnered with Homes of Living Hope to acquire, transform, and ship two shipping containers to Uganda. These containers would not only carry supplies for Mwebaza Infant School and other Mwebaza schools in Uganda, but would also be transformed into new classroom space. It was envisioned that part of this classroom space could be used for computers, to help students learn better and gain essential technical skills for the 21st century economy.
Members of the Mwebaza Foundation in northern Colorado learned about Kids on Computers (also based in northern Colorado) and another partnership began to help manage setup of computers for kids in Uganda.
Planning for the container project commenced around 2017, with the containers being shipped in early 2019. The shipping containers arrived in Uganda in early summer and were delivered to the school site. An advanced team from Mwebaza Foundation spent a couple of weeks getting the containers unpacked and re-constructed, including solar panels on the roof. Read more about the container project.
In July 2019, volunteers from Kids on Computers traveled with several Mwebaza volunteers to Uganda, bringing nearly 50 Raspberry Pis for use in this and other school labs.
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The computer classroom consists of 15 Raspberry Pi 3 workstations, with 1 Internet in a Box media server (256GB) also running from a Raspberry Pi 3. Kids in the school range from about age 3 up to about 13. After the lab was setup, some of the older kids who were a little more savvy with computer skills began helping younger kids as well as teachers. Mwebaza Foundation schools in Kampala area also employ a computer teacher, Mbogo Umar, to visit the school once a week to help teachers and students gain new skills.
January 2020 Update:
The school runs from nursery to primary seven with kids of age (3-13)
These kids are taught in accordance to their age i.e. kids from baby, middle and top (Nursary section) their learning is not all that going on well and at times they give me a hard time because some of the computing words seem to be difficult to them.
So in the nursery section we mainly focus on games which are in built in the system such as in the child play were they pronounce the numbers, tracing out the similar things, and a few in the Educational suit g compri .
So far by the end of last termtimey were able learn how to click a mouse, and they could also identify some letters on the key board
The school also has the lower primary section (P.1, P.2, P.3, P.4)
In the lower primary the things are going on well since in this section kids are mature enough to learn. The kids in this section can identify the hardware components, and with the aid of of inbuilt games like Tux typing the kids at this level are now trying to gain speed in typing since they can locate a lot of keys at a go, concerning a mouse the kid under this section are good because it was clearly handled with the aid of the educational suit g compri games.
In the lower primary section learning is going on well and I am sure by the time they will reach primary seven they will be able to do a lot of work on a computer since they will have enough time to be exposed to the computers.
In the upper primary (P.5, P.6, P.7)
In this section I have been a little bit speedy because I almost had innovators and they were ready to learn all the time. The kids in the upper primary were exposed to a lot of things in the computer lab most especially the primary five and six
They were able to utilise the internet in the box, in different ways, like the use of Wikipedia to search for different things in the world, mind games like sugariser and all in a lot I also introduced them to Libre office writer and by the end of last year they would at least draft a friendly letter using libre office writer
On top of the Kids, we have been also having teacher sessions in this third term holiday which begun in December and it ended last Friday 17th of January . since during their activities the mainly use office progrmes, I introduced the teachers to two libra office programs ie Calc and writer
By the time we ended last Friday, our teachers who were illiterate about computers they were able to draft letters, type exams, circulars among other using Libra office writer.
On the side of libra office calc I only forcused on a few things which I throught would be appropriate in their services and among these we saw how to enter data into a spread sheet, minor calculations like add, subtract, multiply, divide among others. I also introduced them to the IF and the VLOOKUP conditions were I worked hard to see that they can master the processes
- Mbogo Umar
Location: Kyengera, Wakiso District, Central Region, Uganda