The Education4Progress project was born out of the natural merger of four passions: a medium-sized gadget fetish, some serious fandom of the Khanacdemy, coding for kicks and living, as well as a desire to try to do a little to even out some of the world’s crazy inequalities.
Firstly, my passion for gadgets and a career in IT showed me the incredible speed at which we can churn through electronics and the vast amounts of laptops, tablets, and smartphones that are subsequently discarded, many of which are fully functional.
As I’ve mentioned, my love for the Khanacademy runs deep. For those who are unfamiliar, the Khanacademy is an online education platform that offers enthusiastic, engaging, humble and accessible video lectures on everything from arithmetic to art history. On top of their excellent lectures, the online platform also offers mastery-based exercises for free, at all times. For most of us, the Khanacademy provides a better quality and more interactive education than the one we grew up with. Recently, KA Lite has made Khanacdemy’s education platform available to the offline community by providing a standalone application that can be run on a computer without internet access.
Put these two KA platforms together, add in tons of old hardware and connections to several less advantaged communities - Et voilà! Education4Progress is born.
In its first pilot project, Education4Progress sent a few laptops to Masaka, Uganda (another blog post on this soon). And now, due to the success of the pilot project, several more laptops and tablets are being prepared to be taken to Masaka, Uganda in June, followed by another set heading to Jamnagar, India in August.
If you have any old but functioning laptops, tablets, smartphones, routers, usb flash drives, headphones, mice or keyboards that you are happy to donate; if you know about a community with reliable local supporters willing to help set up computers and train students; or if you just want to say hi, please drop us a line at hello@education4progress.org. We’d love to hear from you.
Lastly, some heartfelt gratitude where it is due: even in its early stages this project wouldn’t be where it is without the help of some amazing people: Michael Forbes courierd and deployed the first laptops to Masaka Uganda and employed local staff to manage them; Jason Strachan gifted the website design; and Jess Graves’ donated wordsmithery. You all rock, thanks heaps! A big thank you to Steve Baker from Silverback Cargo Care, Peter Forbes from Navigo and Iris Nemecek for hardware donations. Finally a special shout out to Jamie Alexandre and the KA Lite team for their wonderful work and support .
Firstly, my passion for gadgets and a career in IT showed me the incredible speed at which we can churn through electronics and the vast amounts of laptops, tablets, and smartphones that are subsequently discarded, many of which are fully functional.
As I’ve mentioned, my love for the Khanacademy runs deep. For those who are unfamiliar, the Khanacademy is an online education platform that offers enthusiastic, engaging, humble and accessible video lectures on everything from arithmetic to art history. On top of their excellent lectures, the online platform also offers mastery-based exercises for free, at all times. For most of us, the Khanacademy provides a better quality and more interactive education than the one we grew up with. Recently, KA Lite has made Khanacdemy’s education platform available to the offline community by providing a standalone application that can be run on a computer without internet access.
Put these two KA platforms together, add in tons of old hardware and connections to several less advantaged communities - Et voilà! Education4Progress is born.
In its first pilot project, Education4Progress sent a few laptops to Masaka, Uganda (another blog post on this soon). And now, due to the success of the pilot project, several more laptops and tablets are being prepared to be taken to Masaka, Uganda in June, followed by another set heading to Jamnagar, India in August.
If you have any old but functioning laptops, tablets, smartphones, routers, usb flash drives, headphones, mice or keyboards that you are happy to donate; if you know about a community with reliable local supporters willing to help set up computers and train students; or if you just want to say hi, please drop us a line at hello@education4progress.org. We’d love to hear from you.
Lastly, some heartfelt gratitude where it is due: even in its early stages this project wouldn’t be where it is without the help of some amazing people: Michael Forbes courierd and deployed the first laptops to Masaka Uganda and employed local staff to manage them; Jason Strachan gifted the website design; and Jess Graves’ donated wordsmithery. You all rock, thanks heaps! A big thank you to Steve Baker from Silverback Cargo Care, Peter Forbes from Navigo and Iris Nemecek for hardware donations. Finally a special shout out to Jamie Alexandre and the KA Lite team for their wonderful work and support .
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