Erkki Sutinen visited our group and reported about his work on teaching ICT in Tanzania. It was quite fascinating, as it requires you to change your thinking. Things and attitudes in Africa are so differently that you cannot introduce the idea of ICT in the same way as in Western world. For instance, to introduce the concept of programming, they gave sort of “lego blocks” to the students. These blocks are touchable, i.e., you can feel your program.  Each block had an electronic device, that implemented some function. The function represented either an input, an operation, or an output. By stacking blocks upon each other they formed procedures that perform a function.

The researches explained how to operate with these blocks. Then they just leaned back and observed the student’s creativity. Because the students were so open-minded and have strong roots in their culture, they quickly came up with practical usage scenarios. Consequently, researchers were able to observe the requirements and needs issued by the users themselves. Hence, instead of adapting Western mechanisms to African countries which would hardly work, they investigate approaches stemming from African cultures and try to map to Western countries. A fascinating idea.