AITI: Day 1 and Day 2

Hey Everyone! Sorry I've been silent for the past few days. A lot has been going on in Kigali as we officially started our AITI course this past Monday. I woke up so nervous early Monday morning as Zach and I were getting ready to head to KIST. My thoughts included: "Are you really about to teach computer science?", "What if you speak too fast or too slow?", "What if you tell them something that is completely wrong?"...

Once we finally got in the room, though, my excitement grew much more. When our students would walk in, I would go up to them and greet them with a Rwandan "Good Morning"--'Mwaramutse". Each one of them smiled, probably because I was saying it slightly wrong and probably because it was just humorous to see a "Muzungu" (White Person) speaking Kinyarwanda. At 8:00AM, when class was supposed to start, we had this many students...

We were expecting 46! What happened to all of them!!?!!? By 9:00AM we had somewhere around 32 students, which made us feel a lot better. On the first day, we basically ran through logistics and gave an introduction to the course. Christina ran a really good ideation exercise getting the students to try to come up with solutions to the problem of "Traffic in Kigali". I thought it really got some of the students thinking like entrepreneurs (or at least like Urban Planners {<3 you, Najah Shakir}). Some solutions included a carpooling system, building more roads throughout the city and letting people drive only on certain days of the week.

After that we kinda had to do the boring part of the course and go through the logistics, expectations, rules, etc, which actually took a bit of time. But the big event of the day was a presentation from a company that formed out of last year's AITI Rwanda group--HeHe Ltd. They presented to the students how they were able to start of as just students at KIST and transform into a company that has been standing strong for 1 year already. Many of the students had questions for them, inquiring as to how they came up with their projects last year. All in all, Day 1 seemed like a huge success!

Day 2 was a a bit more....frustrating. We gave the students a Diagnostic test to assess their programming skills and find out what concepts they knew from their previous classes in JAVA and C.We tried to get into the lab yesterday to do all the installations we had to do (Python, Django, Google App Engine) and to make sure the diagnostic as well as the necessary files were available to the students, but there were classes in there up until 8:30PM and Zach and I were exhausted so we decided we could just come in the morning and finish it. It took a LOT longer than we thought. Unfortunately, we ended up giving them the wrong files and we got delayed a good 15 to 20 minutes. We ultimately had to throw out questions 5 and 6 from the exam. Overall, though, the introductory lecture to the Python Material really got people going! We tried to make the point that they already knew a lot of the concepts, they just needed to learn some of Python's syntax!

So far, I'm really enjoying our course and I hope that we can get Python as well as Django to help these students make some great mobile applications! Off to get ready for Day 3, but before I go...here's the sunrise that I woke up to early this morning :) :) :) <3