September 2020 - Tumaini Senior Secondary Students Learn Game Development

Project Based Learning (PBL) courses have long been subjects that Tumaini prides itself upon and that differentiate Tumaini from many other schools in Tanzania. These courses aim to help students develop skills and knowledge outside the traditional curriculum and discover new passions which one day may be useful in their careers.

Ayanda Knyambo, Tumaini's Technology Director, explained how teaching students game, app and web development has been a challenging but very rewarding endeavor; “so many students, particularly girls, have responded really well to these new parts of the curriculum this year. Many have discussed working in technology after they complete school or even developing apps to help with community issues that they see on a daily basis. Teaching game development has been particularly enjoyable as not only do students enjoy the fun aspects of it, but it also gives us a creative way to teach tech fundamentals including dealing with programming and graphics.”

After taking the PBL programming course last year, Christopher and Collins, two sophomore students, have found ways to use their computer knowledge to fix practical problems. Tracking books in the library has always been a challenge, so one of their solutions was digitizing the library system at Tumaini Senior Secondary School.  They created an app that works in conjunction with Google to show which students have overdue books and which books are missing. Collins has the goal to attend MIT one day.

Another problem they are tackling is the census. As Collins explained to me, “it is very difficult to do a census in Tanzania because of the way our population is spread out over cities, villages and even the most remote areas. This makes it difficult to collect accurate data on Tanzania. I want to create a program that would allow a drone to fly overhead and automatically count the people to create a census of Tanzania.”

Very few schools in Tanzania teach computer science to the level that Tumaini does. We hope that by developing this passion in young students, Tumaini will guide leaders of the future in finding technology based solutions that can fix the problems students experience in their own communities.