“Needs Assessments” are activities we Community Developers engage in to find out what the people we are trying to help need. The great thing about them is not just the answer we get, but the little bonuses, the positivie externalities.
During the visit to the last village on our agenda, a place called Ming Bulak, or “A Thousand Springs,” we found ourselves in an IT classroom. Besides the 17 women eager to tell us about the felt making machines they wanted to produce more, higher quality shyrdaks, were lots of computers and hand-painted, plywood signs, in Kyrgyz, detailing how to write code.
Some cool little bits. The letters are all cyrcillic. Most of it is transliteration of words we know, like байт for byte. You guys who know about programming can surely figure out what all is going on.
#1 by Scott on March 23, 2010 - 9:55 am
I had a college classmate from Tajikistan who learned both to program Basic and to type without ever having access to computers or even typewriters. She said they had cardboard keyboards and the teacher would watch them go through the exercise and tell them when they made mistakes. For programming, the teacher would grade their hand-written code without ever running it through a computer to see if it would actually work in practice vs. theory.
When I lived in Ukraine, I heard similar stories from friends who were very impressed with the speed of my typing (which is not all that fast).
I’m glad they actually have real, if dated, computers now. While the very idea of computer literacy classes on cardboard mockups sounds ridiculous, at least the school systems were trying. I think the current digital “wild west” in the former USSR is a testament to the power of working with what you’ve got.
#2 by Than Saffel on March 23, 2010 - 11:03 am
Than you for this story, and especially for uploading the images large like this. I will mine these for design ideas for the rest of my life.
#3 by learning Kyrgyz on April 3, 2010 - 12:47 pm
I really loved these!
So much so, that I would like to ask for your permission to reproduce the first image (Бейсик тили) on our Learning Kyrgyz blog, with a link back to your blog and acknowledgements, of course.
#4 by KyrgyCarl on April 5, 2010 - 5:18 am
Thank you! You officially have permission to reproduce, with my belssings!