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During a routine surfing on web in 2015, I cam across a little single board computer, launched in the UK by a unique name of Raspberry Pi. In a following article, I read that it can be used for introducing Coding, Physical Computing and as well as an Educational Content Server in remote areas where there is poor or no Internet connection. It suited all what I was looking for. At that time it looked quite reasonably priced, although still beyond the purchasing power of an ordinary school in a developing country. It immediately reminded me of an equally nice but failed 2005 launch, of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program that was intended to provide an affordable laptop to children in the whole world. Raspberry Pi, however, looked different and I decided to procure a few for testing and trying here in Peshawar, Pakistan. I managed to purchase two Raspberry Pi 2 through personal contacts and resources. What happened next is a story of successes and failures that is still continuing with no end in the foresight.

The First Raspberry Pi assembly on a wooden board in a school:

On Saturday 2nd May 2015 at 11; 30 AM, a government girls school in Malot, a small village in the outskirts of Islamabad, received a full working system of solar powered Raspberry Pi.

A Raspberry Pi 2 was screwed on top of a wooden plank. The school had no stable electricity supply and a solar power system therefore became a necessity. I secured a dry battery, a solar charge controller and a single medium sized solar panel. The panel was mounted on the roof top with a cable coming down to the solar charge controller, having a dry 12 volts 10 ampere battery, connected as power storage. The power became available but it was 12 Volts at nearly 3 amperes. I found it easy to down convert 12 volts to 5 volts, required to power the Raspberry Pi, with a car mobile phone charger.

The entire assembly can be seen in the above image.

A Pakistani friend based in the US donated Tablets and headsets and also paid for the solar equipment.

Raspberry pi was loaded with nearly 3000 Khan Academy lectures from KA Lite project of the Learning Equality. An excellent resource available at that time.

Within minutes teachers were combing through lectures in Math, Physics, Chemistry and Biology.

The entire experiment was coordinated by an extremely talented and tech savvy Principal of the school.

Teachers were trained, students were given the exposure to the new technology and every thing was going well when the tragedy struck.

The Principal, along with the trained teachers were transferred by the School Directorate in a routine reshuffle to scattered schools around. The whole experiment stalled. The Principal requested for removal of the equipment for fear of loss as there was a planed repair work also to be carried out during the upcoming vacations. That was the end of the first experiment.

The only comments that I received as feed back were:

a. Teachers and Students were finding difficulty in listening to the American Accent

b. The contents are not exactly as they were in their own curricula and were also not presented in the same order.

c. A few teachers demanded voice over in Urdu for science subjects and inclusion of content in social sciences too as part of the syllabus.

The Proposed System:

The three basic components of any education system are:

a) the teacher

b) the content

c) the student 

In the proposed system these components are defined as below:

The teacher, in our proposed system, is any reasonably educated male or female, who is willing to teach voluntarily to a small group of learners and is in possession of at least a  Smartphone with an active SIM.

The contents of this system will be as derived from government approved curriculum. These contents will be digitized so as to make these suitable for delivery in offline, online or hybrid mode.

The students enrolled in this system will be in age group 5 to 16 who could not receive basic or primary education for whatever reason.

For children between age group 5 to 9, completion of the full Primary Education curriculum (class 1 to class 5) will hopefully provide eligibility for continuing education in regular educational institutions.

Unschooled adults, after completion of Grade 1 subjects shall count as literate as per literacy definition in Pakistan.

For children, who are currently studying in primary classes in conventional schools, this system may provide supplementary learning.

The Method:

• The school system will be run under a legal entity.
• The system will encompass the geographical jurisdiction of Pakistan in its entirety.
• A mobile App will be provided to all teachers.
• The Smartphone App for teachers will be freely available for installation from an SD card, for download from our Server or App Stores and even from another Smartphone with the App already installed.
• The App will have two services available.
• One for student enrollment, maintaining a log of student performance, evaluation and progress and 
• The other for access to the stored content, teaching material, necessary training and guides and a library of audio, video, text and auxiliary reading material.
• Internet connectivity with 2G, 3G, 4G, Wifi etc. may be required but only for updating the stored content, as and when required.
• It will be possible to send student enrollment data and performance reports to the system’s Central Server through the Internet or SMS. In case of no connectivity with mobile phone operators, the data shall remain stored in the mobile phone storage medium and will be transferred to the Server whenever connectivity is made available. This will allow use of Smartphones in areas, where there is currently no service available but people can come over to areas with mobile operator services once a while.
• The teacher may use any premises for the purpose of imparting education to a single or a group of students in his/her subject of expertise. However, a group of students in one session may not exceed twenty five.
• Content shall be categorized in courses and lessons as per required pedagogy for Pre-School and Class 1 to 5.
• Each course may have about 40 lessons, with each lesson of 20 minutes duration.
•  All content shall be exactly as per the approved curriculum of the government and digitally produced in our own studios by experts in the relevant subjects.
• The content shall be Open Source and freely available for downloading and sharing from our server under the Creative Common License.
• By default the medium of instructions shall be Urdu with Voice Over available in regional languages or English, wherever needed.
• Deficiencies in indigenous digital contents shall be compensated by procuring contents from local and international content providers.
• All contents shall also be made available on a Raspberry Pi Streaming Server for use by teachers wherever possible. The Raspberry Pi streaming server, in conjunction with a Monitor or TV Display unit, may be very effectively used for a group of students in a makeshift classroom environment.
• DoorDars will seek to receive scholarships, donations, grants, and other help in cash or kind from public and private sector organizations, development agencies and philanthropists to make this system run.

The ultimate goal will be to make education through this system free of cost for the children.