THE CHALLENGE

USAID invited our team to participate in a special session at the Mobile Education Alliance Symposium at the Institute of Peace.  Together we asked, how can we engage children in computational thinking in low-fi settings such as refugee camps and rural areas of the global south?

THE BIG IDEA

Let's build a low-fi computational thinking arcade. 

THE DESIGN PROCESS

We designed the session to be two-fold; firstly give participants a hands-on overview of how they can teach computational thinking in low-fi settings in a contextual and playful way. Secondly provide a platform for discussion and inspiration through a panel discussion that featured experts from the field.

THE arcade

The humans who play team designed an arcade of easy-to-implement activities that ranged from creating soft circuits, to re-designing soccer and creating games in Scratch offline, all while learning about key CT concepts like algorithmic thinking, pattern recognition and decomposition. Each participant took away a custom designed postcard. In addition we curated a panel including speakers from UNICEF Tanzania, Girls Who Code and the LEGO Foundation to discuss with the audience the challenges and opportunities of teaching CT in a low-fi context.