From student to teacher

The last few days we already spent our time at the Armitage Senior Secondary School, a boarding school in Janjanbureh to enable children from different villages in the surroundings to attend high school. Just like every Monday, the week started with an assembly where the vice-principle explained everything in detail about what is going to happen during the coming week. Thereafter, we waited for all our students from grade eleven to arrive in the classroom. We kicked off thefirst lesson with a little introduction game to excite all the students and to let them actively participate in our lessons. It worked quite well! At first we explained about project DOMO as an introduction for the lessons about solar drying. The rest of the day we explained all the processes that come along with solar drying and the science behind it. We also talked about food preservation, the differences between sun drying and solar drying and different types of solar dryers. We made an assignment booklet for them to work on in class, that we discussed afterwards.

In the first place we explained them about solar drying to teach them our knowledge about this technology to make sure they learn from us, but on the other hand we learned a lot from them as well. We had really interesting discussions about both sun drying and solar drying, the ease of use and money issues. Their vision helped us understand the way people think about such a technology in a country like the Gambia, which will definitely be taken into account in our project.

The second day we did a small recap on the content of the previous day and proceeded with new knowledge. We explained about a design process in general and all the important aspects that come along. One of the steps is to come up with as many ideas as possible. We taught them how to make a mindmap in order to get their ideas clearly on paper. In the Netherlands it is a matter of course in how to create a mindmap, it is something most of us did several times throughout our learning process in high school. But the interesting thing is that students in The Gambia learn differently, the lessons mostly consists of repeating and studying everything the teachers write on the chalkboard. This is why this assignment of creating a mindmap appeared to be much more difficult to them than we expected. In the early afternoon we gave them the final big assignment to design their own solar dryers in groups. Each group was given a different customer segment that needed different suitable product values. They students really liked this assignment and in the end one of each group drew their solar dryer on the board and explained everything to the whole class. We are very glad about the results of this class and we ended it with a fun game.

The next two days we taught another class – the eleventh grade commerce section – about how to start a business in general, income and expenses, investment and savings etc.. Besides this, we also talked about marketing in general, market strategies and research, customer segments and product values and we gave them tips for advertisement. The students practiced with all the knowledge during several assignments. But more important, they had to practice all the knowledge in a bigger assignment: the market-simulation game. We came up with this game ourselves so it was exciting for us as well! In short, the game consisted of 5 groups who all represented a small business. They could buy the products – each a different price – they wanted to sell in their shop at ‘the fabricant’s table’, which were balloons, envelopes and bracelets. They also had to rent a shop. So each business had to come up with a market strategy and a suitable business name, slogan and advertisement. Both the students and teachers were given fake money to play the game. The teachers all got different shopping lists from us and we told them to follow their true intuition. Eventually we announced the two winners: the business with the highest profit and the business with the best marketing strategy and advertisement. It was a lot of noise but a lot of fun too!

On Friday, after the last assembly, it was time for us to say goodbye… We took our school companion out for lunch in town and after this said goodbye to the rest of the school. We loaded all the red timber for the solar dryer in a truck, but the moment the car drove out of the schoolyard, the towering wood cut through the electricity cable that was connected to the fridge with the food for the entire school… Oops.

Once travelled back to Kuntaur, we finally got to do our laundry and washed all our dusty clothes, which eventually took hours of quite intense labour. We certainly respect all the hard working women here doing this every week! In the weekend, we relaxed a bit and worked on the reports, exhausted by the busy week.