IT professionals of Goa, led by enthusiastic and go-getters Vincent Toscano and Sangeeta Naik have pioneered into an unique concept in Goa by taking the computer to village schools. The journey to begin with, was tough as to garner sponsorships, was the biggest hurdle. But, since the intentions were noble, professionals in the IT sector started contributing for the cause.
Project GEIT (Goans Empowered with Information Technology), the flagship initiative of Goa IT Professionals (GITP), is the single most revolutionary people-driven change happening in the Goan school education system beginning last academic year. Project GEIT is now all set to reach out to as many Goan village schools as possible this new academic year with a nomination-cum- compliance based model. GEIT also demands inclusion of the children-friendly, open-source “SCRATCH” into the Goa state board syllabus for school-level computer education from this academic year itself.
The core team of GEIT had met the Chief Minister in this regard earlier and will pursue this matter again for its implementation. GEIT recently concluded its pilot year on a high note with a successful 10-day Information Technology-centric Summer Camp 2016 during May 2-13 at the Central Library, Patto which was attended by 84 school kids from 28 different locations across Goa.
There were 25 industry experts and leaders, academicians, creative masters and tech-wizards presented and demonstrated for free and train the sttudents the use of computers in a wide variety of applications relevant to human life today. Prominent among these were internet safety for children, movie-making, animation, robotics, music, telecommunications, ship design, astronomy, blogging, enablement for people with disabilities, mobile app design and development (using App Inventor of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA), networks, databases, agriculture, entrepreneurship, Indian language computing, 3D printing, SCRATCH (i.e. a child-friendly computer programming platform from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA), Hour of Code and more.
The children were left spell-bound and the organisers were thrilled to have some great feedback from them as well as their parents regarding this camp.
Project GEIT also hosted a “SCRATCH” programming contest designed by a tech-wizard Class 8 student Raunaq Hede from Panjim who was also one of the presenters-cum- teachers at this camp. All this was done for free with many parents voluntarily contributing to cover all expenses of this camp while others donated a total of Rs 26,515 to two Goan charities through Project GEIT.
“A key observation from our work so far is that our Goan children have a great hunger to learn the productive and creative use of IT and with the right guidance and hands-on exposure they could beat even children from advanced countries like USA, Japan etc. And this could revolutionize the future of Goans in Goa,” said Sangeeta Naik, Co-Leader of Project GEIT and Executive Member of GITP.
GEITused a cost-effective micro-computer based solution called, Raspberry Pi2 (RPi2), to fix the dead CPUs in these schools and successfully conduct their camp on MIT’s (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA) child-friendly SCRATCH programming platform. Each RPi2 kits costs approximately Rs.4500 and can completely replace the traditional bulky and delicate CPUs while reusing the existing LCD monitors, keyboards and mouse in the school computer labs. Also, the RPi2 needs no air conditioning unlike the traditional CPUs and the open source software it uses is fully license free. For the approximately 350 schools to which the Goa government had provided 10 PCs it would cost barely Rs 1.58 crores to replace all the dead CPUs with RPi2 kits and revive the nearly dead computer Labs across Goa. This is a high returns, minimal investment for the benefit of Goan students.
“Instead of teaching just clerical stuff like Microsoft Office to our children and they whiling away so much of their time on computer games Goan kids need to be formally introduced to computer programming in order to reveal to them the true power of controlling a machine or device. For the sake of our future Goan generations prospering right here in Goa, we demand that the Goa government takes the bold step of introducing “SCRATCH” programming in the school syllabus immediately. Project GEIT offers to conduct a two-day training program on “SCRATCH” for all Goan
school Computer teachers, for free,” said Vincent Toscano, Co-Leader of Project GEIT and Vice President of GITP.
