African School For Excellence

african-school-for-excellence

I've been contributing to African School For Excellence, a school that is re-defining education

Toby Kurien Projects, Web startup ase education african school for excellence jay kloppenberg house4hack web startup startup

I met Jay Kloppenberg back in 2012. From the first meeting, I knew that Jay was onto something. He had an idea for a way to run school classrooms that was so radical, it could not be retro-fitted into existing schools. It required building a school from scratch. To test the idea, he ran a few holiday programmes at various schools. The results were beyond expectations! Thus, African School For Excellence was born.

I've been involved in the technical aspects of the school on-and-off since that first meeting. I helped set up the school network, created some software to run Khan Academy offline, managed and configured the installation of the Moodle learning management system, helped build peer marking software at the Random Hacks of Kindness hackathon, and am continuing to build custom software to leverage the classroom model as much as possible. In late 2014, I organised a "technology roadshow" to the school by House4Hack. The event was covered in an article on htxt.

The school has featured in the media. One of the first media mentions was in an article by IT Web Africa, but since then it's been getting much more media coverage. This is really driven by the outstanding results that the school has achieved so far.