During the month of August, we managed to successfully conduct a lot of workshops and training across Africa and India. Once again we gathered a lot of new students as well as continued working with regular groups.
For instance, that month, we finished workshops at the Department of Physics for 3rd-year students at the University of Antananarivo (UA) in Madagascar. We handed out certificate awards to the students and to our weekly scheduled ones.
At the end of the training, students from the UA prepared a group project showing what they had learnt from our classes: some of them did a radar, a gate system with an RFID card, automatic parking or a smart home. We also carried out labs in the city every weekend, which allowed people who were not enrolled to any school or university to attend our workshops.
Last year we got in touch with the creators of a project called Mibaliaka, which is an undertaking allowing kids from families in need to learn. Fortunately, next month the centre will be officially open and we’ll be able to start with our workshops there. We are looking forward to working with them!
Let's take a closer look at the situation in Uganda.
As a requirement for award of any university degree, students are obliged to undergo industrial training of not less than two months. TME Education Uganda has always been offering such support to students from different universities. This year, 24 students applied for internships or industrial training. Only 6 students were accepted due to COVID-19 restrictions though. The students spent the first month of training learning C programming, from basics to advanced language levels, usage of tools (among others oscilloscopes, multimeters, signal generators and power supplies), components sizing for different applications and design of power supplies. They also learnt interfacing of components such as LEDs, seven-segment displays, and display graphs. TME Education Arduino kits were also used during classes. The next phase of training will include advanced electronics like wireless communication with LORA, GSM, GPRS and IoT solutions development.
After having suspended our workshops in Maputo, Mozambique, in June/July to protect the health of our students due to the increase of COVID-19 cases, on the 25th of August we resumed our activity.
The end of the workshops is scheduled for September 15th. They take place at the Oficina da Ciencia in Matola which is a community centre for vocational training and exam preparation. The centre teaches students from technical institutes, universities and secondary schools.
In that workshop, we have two groups of students: the first group consists of 4 high school students and the other group consists of university and pre-university ones. The training allows them to have practical contact with electronics. As we combine theory with practice, the classes were tailored to the content that students learn at school.
We started our workshop by introducing students to TME Education and the resources that we offer through the web pages and Youtube channel. Later, we talked about the students’ expectations regarding the course. The workshop is divided into two modules.
In the first module, the participants were taught the basics of electronics. In the second week, they were developing a project using the knowledge from the first week. The project consisted of a low-cost automatic hand wash machine, which can be used to help prevent coronavirus. The next week and the second module were used to learn Arduino programming and expanding the skills based on the TME Education kit.
In a nutshell, that was a very busy month in TME Education! We had a lot of success, not only in previously mentioned places but also in other countries. We continue our work to share electronics knowledge and enable it to more people around the world!
