Duradanda VDC, Lamjung District, Nepal
Sarbodaya College is a small but growing school in Duradanda VDC. This college serves as a technical/trade school for Nepali students who are seeking to develop specific skills beyond high school to help with employment and agriculture technique. Kids on Computers® placed four laptops in this school in September 2013. Before receiving these laptops, Sarbodaya had only two non-functional Windows desktop PCs.
[metaslider id=4075]
Each laptop Kids on Computers® provided is configured with Anti-X Linux 13.1, and includes math and typing tutors from Tux4Kids, the LibreOffice suite, Gimp, Chromium web browser, and several other open source apps. Although Internet access is available in the area, networking withing the computer rooms of these schools is not yet complete. Even without Internet access, each laptop also provides offline Wikipedia and/or Khan Academy video content (as space permitted).
A 20 minute walk uphill (north) from Sarbodaya is Duradanda High School, a larger school serving kids from nursery up to 10th grade. This school was recently completed by collaboration of several organizations, including CHOICE Humanitarian. Shortly before we arrived, Duradanda had received a donation of desktop computers from an organization in Asia, and students are beginning to use these computers as part of their curriculum. Krishna Ghimire, the computer teacher for Duradanda, helped us set up the laptops in Sarbodaya and has agreed to be our point of contact for maintenance. Thanks Krish!
Although we didn’t set up any new laptops at Duradanda High School, we were happy to share the offline Khan Academy content. KoC left a 16GB USB flash drive with Krishna, containing a copy of the Khan Academy math and science videos prepared for offline use by World Possible’s RACHEL project (12GB). Krishna already has Chrome browser installed on the computers at Duradanda, so they will work great to play back the HTML 5 videos in the computer lab.