INTERVIEW

Digital Solidarity (continued): the Colombbus association

Operating with the bare minimum of resources, the vocational training association Colombbus bears witness to the new opportunities for grass-roots community support offered by digital technology. Sustainable development is a guiding principle, as the association seeks to encourage a sense of autonomy by regularly replacing its team of trainers so that they can go on to work independently.

Benoît Prady, association director

Please give us a brief introduction to Columbbus.

The association was set up in 2000. Its aim is to use information technology and the Internet to support education, training and workforce-integration for the underprivileged in France as well as the developing world.

• In three developing countries (Venezuela, Benin and Togo), Columbbus has entered into partnerships with local associations. It helps them to set up and run computer centres; passes on practical know-how and expertise via training and exchanges; and encourages the centres to become fully independent.

• In France, Columbbus has for the last two years been developing educational programmes for schools in ‘Education Priority Zones’ and in the ‘Ambition Success Network’ programme (two government-backed schemes). The aim is to define new ways of teaching the sciences to young people via computer technology and the Internet, and to use meetings with working men and women and visits to companies to give young people a real-life insight into the scientific and technological professions.

What have been the results?

Since 2000, we have trained up more than 350 supervisors and more than 4,000 young people have gone through our centres in Venezuela. Of these around 50 moved directly into jobs. In Benin, 400 pupils from the second year of lycée (16 year-olds) were given training in a centre set up by Columbbus. In France, we ran 11 separate workshops in middle-schools in the Paris region during the 2008-2009 academic year. Columbbus gave a presentation before UNESCO in 2002, in Geneva (Prime Minister’s delegation) and Mexico (with the ITU) in 2004, and at the world summit on TIC in 2005.

Can you give us a concrete example of a project operated by the association in France?

One good example is the TANGARA project. This is an open software which we designed as a way of teaching computer-programming in a fun way. It’s an intuitive interface which allows you for very little expense to create pretty complex programmes. We have used it as the basis for our workshops.

Did similar software not exist already?

Yes of course. There was scratch for example, which was developed by MIT, or squeak. But these both quickly got too complex for our needs.

Can you tell us some more about the workshops?

Each workshop functions as a kind of triangle. First there are the pupils, whose task is to bring into being some specific application in a given field of industry. Then there is a professional from a company working in that field, who helps Columbbus design the workshop by means of a kind of ‘educational kit’. And thirdly, there are students from engineering schools or universities who supervise the pupils as they put the ‘kit’ into operation, all under the eye of an actual professor. For example in 2007, one of our workshops – which was devised by a France Telecom engineer – had the task of programming a piece of chat software. This software was then used to conduct a conversation lasting several hours with a partner school in Venezuela.

All this obviously has a financial cost.

Of course. We depend on financing from the public purse and from private donors. In March 2009 it was thanks to a consortium of industrial concerns such as C.genial as well as the Seine-et-Marne local authority that we were able to offer the 11 workshops to middle-schools in the Paris region, in the departments of Essonne and Seine-et-Marne. Each school chose one of five ‘kits’ (one was the chat software I just mentioned; the others were planning a mobile network, a TGV fast train simulator; a rail traffic simulator, and simulator of earth observation satellites). Each school then had about 15 sessions led by the students and their professors. At the end of the academic year, we organised a TANGARA competition in order to recognise the most deserving pupils. The awards ceremony was attended by professors and school-heads as well as parents. They were all very enthusiastic, and many asked that we come back again next year.

And what do you plan for next year?

For 2010, we hope to introduce the RATP (Paris metro) into our ‘kits’, and to have a twelfth workshop funded by the National Agency for Social Cohesion and Equal Opportunities (ACSE). In addition what we really hope to do is to hand over the workshops to the actual professors to that the whole project becomes free-standing. To that end we shall be organising training sessions for the professors, so they can take charges of the classes on their own.