Here's a picture of my new friends in the computer science class at Oshigambo High School. Their teacher, Alice, is an amazing person. As you can see they are not working with the most modern of computers, but they are doing some really good projects. The students are learning both Visual Basic, and Turbo Pascal. They were all eager to show me their projects, which are year long projects. I saw everything from payroll systems to equipment ordering systems. These students must first design the entire user interface, and then develop a system flowchart along with a set of written requirements. Once all of that is done they start building their system using visual basic and access. I wish more American schools would get this far in their computer science curriculum.
We were getting a short tour of the high school when we walked into the computer lab. Their teacher said that I was a computer science teacher from the USA. They immediately pulled me in and I was surrounded by the students. When I told them I was from Luther College it was as if I were some kind of rock star. Thanks to Tim Peter and Greg Peterson for brining groups of students to this high school before. They all well remembered the singing group that was here from Luther 2 years ago. I signed up a dozen students to get additional admissions information. I'm going to ask Scot for a bonus for my recruiting efforts today. I wish that I would have had more time, to spend with the class. Many of them had questions and were testing the limits of my pathetic Visual Basic skills.
I was able to give them a demonstration of the Python eBook I've been working on, so maybe that will become a resource that they can use in the future. I know that after seeing their computer lab everyone was pleased that we were able to bring them 24 laptops and 50 graphing calculators.
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