Ruaha Secondary School (20th April)
On Wednesday 15th April me and Markus visited the secondary school, located in Ipogolo 5 km from Iringa and met with the Principal, Mwageni (Student Counselor) and Grace (IT-lab responsible) and Silas(IT staff). Principle welcomed us and said we were allowed to conduct test sessions at the Computer Lab. Mwageni promised to organize a group of 10 students. We said any students could join only preference was not to be first year(grade) students. Grace suggested Mondays or Tuesdays for the test sessions. We decided to have first session Monday 20th. Today at lunch time I called Mwageni and no group was yet organized but he promised to organize a group. When we arrived at 15:30 half of the group organized had to be excused due to other obligations at the school. We briefly met with the five students and asked if they could find five more students to join. Grace and Silas in the beginning raised concerns that they would like to leave at already at 4 and someone needed to be present and also lock the lab after we were done with our work. Grace made an exception for this time but told that there will be a problem for coming sessions. I suggested that any of the volunteers at the school could stay and lock but Grace did not seem to like that solution. Marcus is thinking maybe we can ask how much she would charge for extra time for next sessions??
Finally at appr. 16:00 students had got organized and we started with 9 students that soon had expanded to 12 (5boys and 7girls) all in form four(Grade-4). We introduced ourselves and explained our objectives and that we are in need of the students’ feedback on the material that we have prepared. 12 Cd's had been prepared with the material, of which one was given to Mwageni, one to Grace the remaining 10 was distributed to the students. We began by asking students to find a computer and trying to open the material by themselves. To our surprise only one computer had a functional CD-player. We then tried placing material on server so that it could be accessed from other computers and eventually two more computers could view the material. With the use of My and Markus’s laptop we had a total of 5 computers for them where 3 of them had sound.
All the technical problems made it difficult to get a good idea of how easy they found the material to use but it was observed that all the groups got a hang on how to navigate the stories and extra material quite easy without the need of asking for assistance. When questioning them about the user friendliness they all claimed that it was easy to use and user friendly interface. I made several attempts to get feedback on what might not have been so intuitive but they all answered it was easy and no problems.
On the material itself there was several comments:
Limitations in additional material, the risk of transmission while in accident where you might get someone’s blood on your wounds. The importance not only about education as pointed out that different education needed for different ages as some things could be harmful knowledge for younger students
Why not making use of video and making material available on more accessible VHS video format as few students have access to computers, students also welcomed printed materials. The VHS option they suggested were for the one who might not have access to computers.
Some found cartoons to static and said it is a bit boring
Requested more and better animations and to make people walking properly and to make mouth move while they speak, to make them look more alive.
Speech bubbles not synchronized enough but students found them important and wanted to see more speech bubbles in the material. They also pointed out the importance for deaf people. (Or when no sound)
In Kisamvu story there is apparently some problem with voices telling something about the mothers asking her husband to inform relatives while already in funeral, which was found a bit strange
Concerns about breasts showing which was not considered appropriate by some
The use of Swahili and English was considered very good but they also wanted to have English voice available for foreign students and to follow school principles of the use of English
The stories were found very practical and look relevant and easy to relate to by the students they did not find material foreign or out of context
Sounds were considered excellent and they enjoyed that there was also some singing.
Some of the students did not like the idea of cartoons because they think they are not small enough to watch cartoon characters and would have been better if the real people were involved in making the stories.
There were also some comments about the presented stories being very summarized, and things were happening too fast.
Some of them suggested that the story should go automatic, ie stories coming one after another without doing anything.
The suggestions were made to synchronize the sound with picture.
There is a necessity to improve the pictures.
Most of the picture did not had the feeling in what the actions were being done. For example, in Mina's Story, she was being beaten but there were no expressions of being in pain.
More story for other causes(other than sexual intercourse) of the HIV disease were found necessary.
Most of the story presented a risk factor focused on males and there was a necessity to provide suggestions to avoid the contamination.
There was a bit of discussion about the speech bubbles. Some of them thought that there should be a lot of speech bubbles with all the things said in dialog while some of them thinks they were too many of them already.
At last, they were asked “If you are given this material and asked to provide education to the other students about HIV/AIDS, do you think you can do that? Why?”. Most of them were very positive that they can definitely go easily with them and the reason was that most of the stories were very simple and practical to say that these could happen easily to them as well.
After about an hour of going through material we had approximately a 15 min discussion about the material
No comments:
Post a Comment