DOHA: The Vodafone Foundation announced at the Mobile World Congress the Instant Classroom, a digital ‘school in a box’ that can be set up in minutes, helping give children and young adults in some of the world’s largest and poorly resourced refugee camps the opportunity to continue education.
The Instant Classroom has been designed for areas where electricity and the Internet connectivity are unreliable or non-existent and will be deployed in partnership with UNHCR’s Innovation and Education units.
The Instant Classroom is shipped in a secure and robust 52kg case equipped with a laptop, 25 tablets pre-loaded with educational software, a projector, a speaker and a hotspot modem with 3G connectivity.
The tablets can connect to the laptop locally, enabling teachers to deliver content and applications to students without the need to access the Internet.
All components of the Instant Classroom can be charged simultaneously from a single power source while the case is locked. After six to eight hours of charging time, the Instant Classroom can be used for a full day without access to electricity.
Over the next year, the Instant Classroom will be deployed to 12 schools in refugee settlements in Kakuma in Kenya, the Nyarungusu refugee settlement in Tanzania and the Equatorial Region in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Instant Classroom will provide up to 15,000 children and young adults aged 7 to 20 with advanced teaching aids that are available in a minority of schools in developed nations.
The Instant Classroom builds on Vodafone Foundation’s experience with tablet-based learning programmes.
Last year, Vodafone Foundation worked with UNHCR’s Education and Innovation units to develop Instant Network Schools programme, which introduced tablet-based learning to around 18,000 pupils in the Dadaab refugee settlement in northern Kenya.
Teachers at Dadaab schools said the tablet-based lessons have been so popular that pupil attendance had increased by an average of 15 percent.
Over the next two years, Instant Network Schools programme will be extended to support additional schools in refugee camps in Kenya, Tanzania and Congo to reach out to more than 40,000 children and young people.
Andrew Dunnett, Director, Vodafone Foundation, said: “At the end of 2013, UNHCR estimated that there were 50 million refugees and displaced people worldwide, half under 18. With refugees displaced from homes for an average 17 years, many have little or no access to education.
“Instant Classroom is robust, simple and powerful. It puts the best technology educators have to offer into the hands of children and young people living in the toughest of environments.”
The Peninsula
