TCB in Bayangam
After months of planning and collecting donations in Germany, the TCB project in Cameroon was implemented at the technical high school of Bayangam (LTB = Lycée Technique de Bayangam) in November 2021. The project team arrived mid November while the material had been sent before in Bayangam.
On the first day the project team met with the local teachers and discussed the details of the workshops for the following days. Further, we arranged the time schedule with the two classes which took part in the workshops so that we could work with them while respecting their regular schedule.
In the discussion with the teaching personnel it turned out that currently there is no room available for long-term usage of the laptops. Thus, we decided to use laptops in the form of a mobile computer room.
In the afternoon we started the workshops with the two classes separately with different levels of IT experience. We started with the word processor tool and used it to create individual CVs. Afterwards, we used the spreadsheet application to learn about handy tabular calculation functionalities.
On the second day of the workshops we finished teaching the office programs by introducing the pupils to the presentation software. As an exercise each student had to create a presentation with two slides providing pictures and information about the LT Bayangam. The exercise was finished with one student presenting his presentation.
In the following days we continued the workshop with a focus on specialized software for electrotechnical purposes. As the final and most complex program, KiCAD was presented to the pupils. KiCAD is a free software for electronic design automation. It facilitates the design and simulation of electronic hardware. Together with the students, we worked through each step of designing a LED timer such that they know how to design the schematic, assign the virtual components with their physical footprints and finally design a PCB board which can be sent to a manufacturer.
Although the workshop provided a lot of information in short time, all pupils took part in all of the classes and maintained a very high level of concentration throughout the program. We, as the project team, were also very happy to see that the pupils helped each other during the sessions and that all of them got very comfortable in working with the laptops.The LT Bayangam received 18 laptops, USB-Mouses, multi-outlet power strips, a beamer and a visualizer by TeoG. Further, the project team commissioned the construction of a metal cabinet to store the hardware securely.
