Teaching computers in rural Ladakh

Basic Computer Class

This is the setup: six small netbooks, three netbook power cords, two large laptops (but usually only one in the computer lab on any given day), two outlets, and one power strip with loose connections and two stripped wires in place of a plug. On a good day, it’ll take less than half an hour to find the scattered, borrowed laptops, charge any that need it, wedge the power strip’s wires into the outlet with little rolls of paper, and finally write the day’s lesson on the whiteboard.

However, when you’ve finished disentangling your expectations from their privileged Western roots, it’s a pretty nice arrangement — there’s reliable electricity thanks to the solar panels (I still remember having only 3 hours of electricity per day in Khaltsi with April), the room is clean, airy, and decently sized, and the laptops all run a recent version of Windows. It also carries the faint aroma of warm wood and sun-dried tomatoes, since said tomatoes are often laid out to dry for the winter in the room next door.

The students are sweet, eager to learn, and still — most definitely — teenagers. The fist day I set up RACHEL on my Raspberry Pi, by far the most common question was “can we use Facebook now?” Not that they weren’t excited by all the other features, but I definitely got the feeling that I would have received undying gratitude, hugs, and a victory lap of the building on their shoulders had I been able to bring Facebook and WhatsApp to campus.

Despite the desire for social media, many of the students had only a passing familiarity with desktop computers. One of the quirks of countries where the middle class is just now developing is that smartphones have eclipsed desktops and laptops. Some of these students have more social media accounts than I do, but very few are comfortable using a word processing program. SECMOL, too, does not draw from the privileged families in Ladakh, so the (mostly government) schools the students have attended would not have used computers in the classroom.

Typing

The first order of business was a rather boring slog through learning how to type. The two-finger three-words-per-minute (you think I’m exaggerating? I’m not exaggerating) typing style they came in with would have significantly hampered efforts to teach Microsoft Word, Excel, and online researching and note taking. Typing exercises took up the first week, aided by games and frequent speed and accuracy competitions (with prizes). If I had been planning to stay longer, I would have spent at least double the time on typing, and perhaps integrated it with their English class by having them type up their assignments and journals.

I taught the class with a fellow volunteer from Delhi, Zorawer, and although we tried to keep skill in English as divorced from success in computer class as possible — we wanted to give students who struggled in English a chance to shine with computers — we did run into a few problems. When we handed out printed copies of a typing exercise that we wanted them to copy exactly, the students ran into problems with punctuation, capitalization, and line breaks. Perhaps because the scripts for both Hindi (Devanagari) and Ladakhi (Bodhi) lack capital letters and generally use less punctuation than English, Ladakhi students are less used to paying attention to those features in English text. I still have no idea why line breaks were such a stumbling block, though. Some students were so rigorous in copying our text exactly that they would hit enter wherever the text happened to wrap on our printout, and some had such a cavalier attitude towards formatting that new lines seemed to occur completely at random, or perhaps by accident.

Little unexpected quirks like those serve to remind me not to take anything for granted. It reminds me a little of the summer I spent as a personal assistant to an eccentric artist who wished to learn how to use a computer. I remember booting up her secondhand desktop for the first time and telling her to click on the “Start” button in the bottom left to open up the menu. She first tried poking the screen (a little less amusing now that touchscreens actually exist), and when I told her what a mouse was and how to press the buttons on it to click on things, she picked up the mouse, held it against the computer screen, and clicked.

As silly as those actions may seem from my point of view, neither the Massachusetts artist nor the Ladakhi students were acting irrationally. Those of us who grew up with computers have created a set of norms for interacting with them, aided by developers who occasionally guide and occasionally are guided by the actions of users. We progressed smoothly from word processing on a desktop to Wordpress-ing on a laptop; from Comic Sans to Helvetica; from … eh, you get the picture. Many of the things we do make little sense to someone coming to them now for the first time — just think of the save icon, or the symbol for folders.

Spreadsheets

Once we made it to spreadsheets, the students were more familiar with the keyboard, and how to open and save documents. It was a fun unit because we could make it immediately applicable to the students’ lives. At SECMOL, they’re responsible for the entire running of the campus — cows, gardens, water, electricity, accounts, and all. They rotate responsibilities every two months, and most responsibilities involve some sort of bookkeeping which the students did by hand in big logbooks. But no more! We had them learn addition, multiplication, finding the mean, and basic functions in MS Excel using number sets like the campus supply purchases, cow milk production, and garden harvests. Since teaching math in government schools usually relies heavily on memorization, the students often lacked a real understanding of mathematical concepts. It was much easier to explain what “average” means using concrete, familiar examples.

“Online” Research

Our second fun unit was on online research, particularly exciting to be able to do since SECMOL doesn’t have an internet connection. I had been looking forward to this as a chance to test out my Raspberry Pi in a classroom setting, and it worked wonderfully. I blew the minds of a good number of students with my “fake internet” although after they got over the surprise, the first thing they asked for was facebook — high school students are the same everywhere.

I can’t say enough in praise of RACHEL Pi, the educational package I used on my raspberry pi. They’ve curated a bunch of fantastic resources, and I could really see the thought behind each choice. The students mostly used Wikipedia light, Medline Plus Medical Encyclopedia, and Infonet-Biovision. They’ve added a few new sections since I downloaded the disk image, but you can see the sample content here.

For the students, the hardest part by far was learning how to search. In school, they’re encouraged to copy what the teacher writes word-for-word, so they’re not very practiced at pulling out key words or ideas. When I wrote a question like “What is the capital of Kazakhstan?” they would write that entire phrase into the search box. While that would work for Google nowadays, RACHEL’s relatively simple search engine does better with one or two search terms. If I were to teach the same lesson again, I would spend at least half a class with them in front of the whiteboard, having them practice collectively pulling keywords from increasingly complex questions.

Researching on the Pi was the last new concept we taught, but we reinforced previous lessons by having them write up research summaries in Word and look up country GDP and population statistics, using Excel to calculate and graph per capita GDP. The cumulative lessons were some of the most helpful, in my opinion. Since we had gone over each individual concept already, the students were able to complete complex sets of tasks without feeling overwhelmed.

College Web Design Class

The college web design class had its own completely separate set of challenges and rewards. Overall, I think the structure and difficulty of the class were in the right ballpark, although the pacing was a little too fast. In a month a tried to teach everything from what code looks like to how to lay out a basic website. We were even more hampered by not being able to assign homework or practice in between classes, since I couldn’t be sure that the students would have access to a computer. Oh, and there was no internet. Still, they did remarkably well with what we had.

We covered basic HTML, and in CSS we did text styles, backgrounds, colors, positioning and floats. I'm not sure how well they’ll do with complex layouts, but most of them accomplished simple ones with minimal aid. There’s a world of difference in the computer fluency of the 10th-standard SECMOL students and the college boarders, and it really showed. The one similarity, though, is the excellent proficiency in memorization and the relative struggle with implementation. If I were to teach the class again, I would greatly increase the length and spend much longer on individually practicing each concept. Often I tricked myself into thinking they had grasped a concept because they could answer my questions, but when they had to code an assignment they still struggled.

I think this could be remedied with a greater focus on completing code challenges for each concept, but I would need more computers to do so. Having two or three to a laptop means either only one person gets to code a given challenge, or the task takes two to three times as long. Before I go back I’ll either hope they get another computer donation, or find a way to bring some myself.