+Escuelas | Open Leaders 6
Read the Spanish version here.
+Escuelas is a project that seeks to include mobile technology to prevent early high school drop out and help teenagers get a high school degree with tools that help them to stay on track and organized.
I interviewed two participants of Open Leaders 6, Sofía and María Eugenia Romero, to learn more about their project +Escuelas, and how others can contribute their work.
Q: What is +Escuelas?
A: +Escuelas is an app that has as a goal to improve the academic life of students, improving their performance in school through class attendance monitoring, and through tools like digital notebooks and a calendar, that help students to stay organized and up to date with their work.
Q: Why did you start +escuelas?
A: We started this project together with a third girl, in a program called “Programando un mundo mejor” (Coding a Better World) by the argentinean non profit “Chicas en Tecnología” (Girls in Technology), back in 2017. In this program, we were given the challenge of creating an app with which we could solve a problem we observe on our everyday life. We observed that in our school, some kids were affected by low performance and high school dropout. An example of this is the growing number of girls who get pregnant and leave school. Thinking of this demographic, we created the app, so that girls in this situation don’t stop studying, which is key for their development. With our app, we strive for everyone to have a chance to study.
Q: Why do you think it is important to incorporate mobile technology in high schools?
A: Mobile technology, as a tech device, serves the same role as the computers we are given in school, and they even have a few advantages: they are faster, they don’t limit student access at certain times , and they carry very few technical problems. If students learned to use mobile technology in a positive way, cellphones could become an excellent tool: with them, we can access internet, take notes, and work on any task we need to complete. We are now undergoing a phase of exploration and development, where we see that technology is everywhere. We believe that technology literacy from an early age, knowing how to handle tools and how to be careful, is going to set us up for success in our world. Our app, +escuelas, is a step towards this direction because it is designed specially for high school students. We want to both help students with specific tools, and show school principals and teachers that cellphones are not just a distraction, they can be used for studying.
Q: What challenges did you face in the development of this project?
A: Some of the challenges were:
- Taking part in a program that is 100% in English. It was the first time for us, speakers of English as a second language, that we had to speak, write and comprehend everything in a foreign language, at least for the full cohort calls. While we study English, we don’t speak it everyday, so this was challenging.
- Since we are high school students, we don’t have a solid foundation in design and development, which makes it hard for us to develop an app from scratch; every time we learn something new, we try to incorporate it, even though it’s hard.
- While we have computing at school, our teachers are not well prepared to support us. This subject is very new, so we couldn’t rely on them to help us with our project.
Q: What skills does a person need to be able to contribute to your project?
A: We are looking for developers, designers, experts in code structure and experts in education. We are focusing on these skills for contributors because, since we are high school students, we don’t have deep knowledge on any of these fields. We don’t know how to properly design an app or give it the functionalities we want it to have. Education experts can help us to design strategies to reach out to teenagers, and to learn what we need to know about them. The most important skills contributors need to have: lots of patience and willingness to collaborate on our project ;-)
Q: How can others contribute to your project?
A: They can contribute by leaving a comment that allows us to improve, or by sharing the app with other people and help us to spread the word. Everyone is welcome to contribute, we are looking forward to constantly improve.
- A designer could help us by creating a logo and an engaging interface.
- When it comes to developing, we need someone who can help us to move the app from App Inventor to another platform where other people can access it.
- A specialist in education can help us by making information accessible to students; and how to organize the app so that its use is efficient and comprehensible.
Q: How did Open Leaders program help you in your project?
A: This program was very helpful in planning our project, understanding where we want to go with it, and deciding on what functionalities we want our app to have. Even though, in the beginning, we had a general idea of what we wanted to do, as we continued to work on the app we started thinking of more functionalities, and it became harder for us to limit the scope of our project. With the Mozilla Open Leaders program, we were able to focus on something specific and we were able to explain the project in a clear way. Open Leaders also taught us things we didn’t know, like how to use GitHub and how to share your project on different channels. It was helpful to think of the project in the long term, and not just to focus on the next year, but to imagine instead what could happen in 20 years, and expand the horizons of our project in this way. It was our first experience in an international program. At the beginning, we have to admit that we were nervous because we didn’t know what we were getting into; however, throughout the program, we started to feel more comfortable and were able to share our views with others on our cohort. We had a fantastic experience, we were able to grow a lot, and we want to thank our mentors, who were always available to help at all times, and without them we would have been lost: Sabrina Izcovich, Laura Rodríguez, Laura Morinigo and María Cruz ❤
Q: Would you recommend the program to others? Why?
A: Yes, participating in experiences like this one is very gratifying. The opportunity to take part in an international program doesn’t happen every day. The organization of the Open Leaders program is very accessible: during the cohort calls, reading the notes is very helpful to follow with the conversation. Considering that the entire program is in English, if this is not your first language, it may be intimidating at first, but you will overcome this. We don’t regret joining the program in the slightest, and we are grateful that we were invited to join the Open Leaders cohort 6, it was a unique experience!
Q: What gif describes your project?
A:
From https://giphy.com/gifs/cat-computer-working-11JTxkrmq4bGE0
Watch Sofía and María Eugenia present their project at the Open Leaders demo call (starts at min 38:35):
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Sofía and María Eugenia Romero are high school students in Buenos Aires, Argentina. They participated in the Mozilla Open Leadership program through a partnership with the local organization Chicas en Tecnología, where they learned how to design apps with social impact.
