Teachable Moments from Johannesburg to Mpumalanga

Greetings from Mpumalanga, South Africa! It’s been about two and half weeks since I left New York to embark on a month-long trip through the country to present at the EdTech Summit Africa conference and what a trip it’s been. After spending five fun-filled days of leisure and adventure in Cape Town, I met up with the rest of the EdTech team in Johannesburg where we held our first two summits at Dainfern College (here in South Africa, college sometimes refers to a high school) and Wits University. There, I had the pleasure of running a Scratch workshop for South African educators who were eager and enthusiastic about learning techniques and strategies for incorporating technology and digital media into their classes.

My workshop, How to Teach Computational Thinking and Design Skills: Inspire Your Students with Video Games, provides participants with an introduction on how to design a video game using Scratch, a free web-based tool, and explore how game design helps to promote youth self-expression, support children to learn more deeply about issues and stories that interest them, and develop important problem-solving and computational thinking skills along the way. Participants complete a brainstorming activity that can be applied to a variety of lessons and educational contexts. Next, they use their ideas from the brainstorm to “remix” a game on Scratch, using Scratch’s block coding interface. I designed this workshop because I think it’s useful to educators withany level of programming experience and expertise in any subject, even if the educator has never done any coding before. Resources from my session can be found here.

A summit attendee plays her very first video game, “Journey of an Immigrant Kid”. Shout out to the Global Kids who created the game!

​Since leaving Johannesburg for Mpumalanga about a week ago, we’ve held two more summits at a primary school and a secondary school whose educational resources stand in contrast to one another. Babati Primary, located in the rural outskirts of Mpumalanga, was our first stop and does not have internet, or any technology for that matter, apart from two projectors with VGA inputs that can be connected to a laptop. Therefore, we brought the technology to the school, spending the morning setting up wi-fi hotspots in each of the four rooms used for workshops, enduring spotty and slow connectivity throughout the day, and adapting our activities for tablet use. This was particularly challenging for me because my workshop focuses on Scratch, which can only be used on a desktop computer, so before my 11:00am workshop I feverishly worked to install Scratch Jr., a tablet app that I barely have any experience using, on seven iPads for my participants to use. While I (full disclosure) semi-improvised the Scratch Jr. portion of the lesson , all learning objectives were met and my participants expressed gratuity for having been able to learn to use the app.

My workshop participants brainstorming ideas for a video game

The next day, we ran the summit at Penryn College, a private high school, near the town of Nespuit. Unlike Babati, Penryn is fortunate enough to have multiple wi-fi networks, modern classrooms, and a computer lab with up-to-date desktop PCs. Actually, up-to-date doesn’t even begin to describe this computer lab. It had bins of legos for robotics, lego WeDo kits, a smart board, and a few other tech tools that most schools in NYC would be lucky to have. Luckily, technology was on my side and I didn’t run into any hang-ups, which allowed for a relatively smooth session.

Scenes from sign in and orientation at Penryn, or “Penreach”, College”

The educators who attend the summit demonstrate profound interest and passion for learning new tools and strategies. Many of them drive long distances, some from three hours away, and come with absolutely no technological skill, such that they have never used a computer before, let alone have an e-mail address or know how to connect their cell phone to a wi-fi network. Most of them don’t even have a single computer or internet access at their schools. Nonetheless, a significant amount of learning happens at every session. Some educators come not ever having touched a mouse, clicked on a desktop icon, or typed a single word on a keyboard but leave having learned to do all of those things. I personally assisted about ten attendees in setting up Gmail, Twitter, and Facebook accounts and showed them how to click on things and type.
This kind of instructing might sound monotonous and elementary to the technologically experienced and I admit that my patience as an educator was tested in a few instances, but for me these were teachable moments. I learned not to make assumptions about participants’ technological aptitude and to ask questions in order to gauge their level of comfort with the technology before giving instructions. What’s more is that it is my responsibility as an instructor to make the learners feel comfortable using the technology and encourage them to explore the tools while assuring them that it’s alright to make mistakes. How else does one learn problem-solving skills if not by correcting mistakes? At first, I was frustrated about having to teach such rudimentary computer use like clicking and typing, but now I look forward to working with educators who lack those skills because they come to the summit knowing next to nothing about using technology, let alone using it in their classroom, and leave the summit having gained basic abilities and confidence they previously lacked.
Yesterday, the EdTech team and I celebrated Nelson Mandela Day, an international day in which South Africans honor the beloved president by committing 67 minutes of their day to doing some community service. We joined up with Frank Maghinyane High School students for a community clean-up in an area of rural Mpumalanga near Kruger National Park. The United Nations named July 18th, Mandela’s birthday, an international day in which the 67 minutes of service signifies the 67 years that Mandela dedicated to making the world a better place.

The next EdTech Summit will be held on Wednesday, July 20th at the University of Limkokwing. For more information about the summit, check out the website and follow on social media:
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