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- Description of Mauritania: geography, ethnicity, culture, history
- Facts (Statistics from the CIA factbook) about Mauritania: poverty, literacy rates, internent access
- How XOs can impact the people of Mauritania \
Tidjikja, a city of 6000 and the capital of the Tagant region, is a vibrant, yet rural town. Its inhabitants are aware of the outside world, but their only link to it is a 12 hour drive to the capital city, Nouakchott. Tidjikjaians are enthusiastic about learning and interested in other cultures. Seth Luxenberg, who is currently stationed there while working for the Peace Corps, reports that he has helped to form a local English club, and is corresponding with a vocational school in the area to teach computer skills. In addition, he teaches English and environmental skills at the local elementary schools école primaire 1 and école primaire 5. We will work with these schools to distribute the laptops to the students there.
With these laptops, students will be able to break free of the traditional "eyes front" method of learning and can learn at their own pace. In addition, their entire extended family will have the benefit of being able to interact with a computer. Our pedagogical leads are creating sample lesson plans to prepare the teachers to integrate the laptops with the curriculum, which is split between Arabic and French. We plan to set up a correspondence with a local school in Ithaca so the students can share their experiences with American students of the same age.
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- City they are working in, facts: location (distance from capital, etc), population, description
- Our contact within the town: who, what he does, skills he has, children he works with
- Schools we will be working with: grades, number of children, etc
- What the children will do with the laptops
- Benefits the laptops will bring to the children
- How the family will benefit
- Possible curriculum ideas
- Language the children speak (Arabic and Frencg?)
- Set up correspondence with local school in America; pen pals
- Logistics: the students are on break, who the teachers will be. Will we get backing of the local community?
- Sustainability: We will teach adults? teachers? volunteers? How to use the XOs. How long our ground contact will be in that area. Will we hand over the project to the administrators of the school
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- Transportation of laptops, security issues, language barriers