Durbar High School (Nepal)

The first project we were involved in was at Durbar High School, the oldest school in Nepal. Two overseas charities, the Nepal Trust from Scotland and Project INitiate from Singapore, are working with the school to provide equipment and training to ensure that students are given comprehensive and relevant lessons in computing. Members of CAN, the Computer Association of Nepal, have also added their support to the project, and E-mail and Internet access is being provided by Unlimited NuMedia, a local ISP.

Two separate rooms were refurbished by the school and stocked with computing equipment provided by INitiate and the Nepal Trust. One room has modern Pentium machines, which are used with Windows 95, Microsoft Office, multimedia CDs, touch typing, E-mail and Internet, etc. The second room has older 386 computers, used to teach subjects required by the SLC syllabus such as Dos and Qbasic.

Ming's feelings in year 2000 .....

There was so much to do and so little time. Thankfully my strength is in getting things organised. I soon learned about the many things that happen around the school, such as the frequent holidays which they often forgot to tell us about! It became customary for us to say 'See you tomorrow' before we left and we would then know whether to turn up or not for the next day.

The students we taught were from levels 8, 9 and 10, starting from the age of 14. We kept the groups small and they worked in pairs for the first few lessons. Then we split them up into two groups when they were confident to work alone on a computer. They were taught Notepad to learn about the keyboard and simple text editing. They were taught Paint for mouse control - they loved drawing and were very good at it. After learning the features of Windows, Word and Excel did not seem so complex when they come to learn them. Some students were selected to learn DOS and Qbasic, but they did not enjoy it very much and found it difficult after using Windows. Learning to type was not so exciting either, but the students plodded on and became proficient.

An e-mail penfriend exchange was set up with a UK school for Level 8 students. Their writing brought out the innocence of children - no cultural barriers, no racism, just pure friendship! Surfing the Net and playing multimedia CDs like IBM's World Book were a great hit with the students. Such joy it gave them to have found a picture of their favourite wrestler and save it to their folder. To prevent them going wild we had to lay down rules that they could only save ten pictures in their Internet folder and we introduced educational topics for surfing. Level 10 students went on to learn PowerPoint and web site design. It did not take them long to introduce the sounds of breaking glass, screeching brakes and explosions into their PowerPoint animations! There were times we thought we were running a game machine centre(!) but it was such a pleasure to see the students having fun while they learnt.

In May the school hosted a "Parents Day" when students and parents visited the school to discuss the examination results. We decided to open the computer room on that day and put on an exhibition to show off students' work and demonstrate the kind of applications that they had learnt. The students set up and manned various demonstrations in the downstairs computer room, including computer-generated art, word processing, multimedia CDs, E-mail and surfing the Internet.

Six students from level 10 went out on job placement shortly after their final examination. The aim was to give them exposure to a working environment and to build contacts with local organisations. The British Council took five of the students and Amnesty International took the other. Rather nervous to start with, they soon fitted into their new environment and enjoyed the experience. Feedback from employers and students was good, with some students even wanting to stay on for a permanent job!

More than 20 teachers did the computing course - a good show out of the 30+ staff in the school, but where were the men? Men still dominate the computing field, but strangely enough in Durbar it was the women who were keen! They followed a course similar to the students, but it became more project based in the later stages. They came to classes out of their own interest and we tried to show them how computing could be integrated into their jobs, such as preparing examination papers and mark sheets.

There were times that the students were mischievous and I shouted at them, but they will always be my sweet kids. I will always remember the teachers coming in their colourful saris and smiling faces - they will always be my lovely ladies. As for the few brave men that came, I applaud them!

Epilogue

The project is still running and we hear that there are plans to install additional computers soon. If you would like to know more or are interested in supporting this school then please get in touch with either the Nepal Trust or Project INitiate via their web sites.