Have UCC students figured out a viable, sustainable and duplicatable model for Internet delivery at schools in the developing world? Watch this video and find out! In March, four UCC students (Derek Chan, Amal Chandaria, Connor Cimowsky and Adam Gordon) and their teacher, Mark Battley, traveled to the Ntugi Day Secondary School in Kenya to test an innovative way of bringing laptops and the Internet to a school with no power and no previous experience with computers. The boys’ groundbreaking idea was to use a combination of durable OLPC laptops, local cell-phone SIM cards, portable wireless routers, and solar panels in order to bring the Internet to Ntugi. You can read about their implementation in these two olpcnews.com posts tinyurl.com and tinyurl.com This video, made by two of the four participants, Amal Chandaria and Connor Cimowsky, documents both their struggles and their successes. Amal and Connor are both film students at UCC. The video won the National Middle School Association’s Video Contest and, in November 2009, will be shown as the closing video for the NMSA’s annual conference. The theme of the conference is “Making A World of Difference”: www.nmsa.org The project participants would like to thank One Laptop Per Child, the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, CradlePoint Technology, Tekkeon and Safaricom — our partners in the search for a viable and easily replicated solution to use portable 3G wireless, durable laptops and renewable power to provide Internet access …
