Interactions - January/February 2009

The potential use of the cellular
phone already in the pocket
of many school-going children
is an enticing prospect for those
looking to improve the quality
of education. This is especially
true in a country where
the school-leaving qualification
program has a pass rate of
only 60 percent.

January + February 2009

Reflection

Ostensibly, this project is about using a mobile chat service (MXit) as an educational tool. However, as we develop and reflect on the project, we realize there are more general lessons for others trying to make effective ICT interventions in the developing world.

Conceptualizing the Internet. For most of our users, MXit is the Internet. They have no notion of sophisticated Web applications and browsers; if it isn’t accessible through MXit, it does not exist. If you are trying to reach users with a new service, then we suggest you look at the ICT they are already familiar with and use that to give them a hook into the new system. It may be they use a system similar to MXit.

Local market forces. Within South Africa we have relatively cheap data plans that are accessible to pay-as-you-go customers as well as customers on contract. On current plans, users can access data at 8 cents/Mb. Most customers can therefore conduct all their communications for a few cents per day! It may be that other countries have similar low-cost data plans, or perhaps there are other low-cost ways of communicating—for example, populating voice mailboxes with information in response to an SMS query.

The many handsets problem. Anyone who has tried to do a wide-scale deployment of mobile applications will know the headache involved in trying to write software that will run on any platform. Had we attempted an intervention in the school on our own, it would have been cheaper to buy the students identical handsets rather than invest the programmer time to create software for every handset the students have. Fortunately, we could leverage the MXit infrastructure already in place. Again, if MXit is not available, then it may be worth seeing how much you can achieve with, say, a WAP interface before going the painful route of creating your own client software.

More Bots

The first new bot was the multiple-choice bot, which not only asked questions related to the subject but also provided feedback on both correct and incorrect answers. When the student answered correctly, he or she received further information expanding the concepts behind the question; an incorrect answer prompted an explanation of why the answer was wrong.

Following up from there, we decided to expand the service by introducing equation-solver, dictionary, and Wikipedia bots.

With the equation solver, students were able to type in a quadratic equation to get a step-by-step guide on how to solve that equation. The dictionary and Wikipedia bots are essentially reference services; both allow students to follow up on words or concepts they do not understand by using MXit as an interface to online services.

The bots lend themselves well to content-based subjects. At present we are using them in information technology and mathematics, but we have not attempted to introduce bots to support other subjects. Rather than attempt this translation ourselves, we have instead been working with other

teachers to empower them to create their own bots to support the teaching of their subjects. Our hope is to create a suite of bots that will be accessible to anyone using MXit.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jakkaphan
Tangkuampien is working on his Ph.D. in computer
science at the University of Cape Town, South
Africa under Gary Marsden. He also teaches the
subject of information technology to high school
students. His research interest is in exploring the
potential of mobile devices in education in the developing world
where computing devices are not as readily available.