The Peace Corps experience can be more than a little frustrating. Sometimes, no matter how hard I worked, progress comes slowly, if at all. Most volunteers have similar problems, so Peace Corps often gives its volunteers the opportunity to attend "in-service training", usually in the form of a three- or four-day conference between volunteers and local experts. It focuses on a specific topic - AIDS education, for instance - and it gives everyone a chance to share experiences, to brainstorm new ideas, and to take a step back and look at the big picture. Somehow, these conferences always melted away my frustrations and gave me new energy in whatever projects I happened to be working on at the time.

One such conference was on Gender and Youth Development (GYD), which meant learning how to promote social equality for women and children. For example, Ghana has a huge problem with girls dropping out of school before they graduate, so we talked a lot about how to keep girls in school. One of the ideas that came up was a "girls club", a kind of Girl Scout program but without the camping. It sounded like fun, so I decided to try setting one up at my school, without really knowing what I was getting myself into. Below you'll find an article I wrote about my experiences starting this club. It appeared in an issue of The Exchange, a Peace Corps newsletter on gender development.

Girls in Ghana Get Computerized

Figure 1 Faustina, Alimatu, and Gariba (from left to right) record songs onto a laptop computer.

"What is all this...singing?" asked the schoolmaster, squinting through his spectacles at eleven young women huddled around a laptop. "I thought you were teaching them computers." The girls ended their song--something about sending your girl-child to school--and he watched closely as one of them tapped a key. Instantly the room filled with a digital recording of their voices, piped through the laptop’s tiny speakers.

"But I am teaching them computers," I replied. The schoolmaster seemed perplexed, then frustrated, and finally said, "Please tell them to reduce the noise small. They are disturbing my work." As he turned to leave, another girl pressed a different key, and the recording was played again, this time at double-speed. The girls burst into laughter at the sound of their altered, high-pitched voices. The schoolmaster closed the door, shaking his head and looking slightly annoyed.

When I began teaching computer classes six months ago, I never thought that getting my colleagues to accept my unusual teaching methods would be a problem. But there were plenty of obstacles, as I discovered, in teaching computer literacy to girls in Ghana. In this article, I want to share my experiences and offer some tips on how to overcome the challenges of teaching computer skills in a developing country.

Computer Classes with the Girls Club

The first step, of course, was to find some computers. I had brought a laptop with me from home, but that wasn’t enough for the fifteen girls who had signed up for the club. And although my town had recently been wired for electricity and was growing at a phenomenal pace, the only computers around were tucked away in a few NGO offices and the hospital administration block.

Luckily, the government had recently established over a hundred "science resource centers" across Ghana, each containing chemical solutions, dissection kits, magnets, and all kinds of equipment for teaching science--more stuff than my old high school back in America ever provided. Also included were six computers for running educational software and gathering data from experiments. None of the science teachers knew how to use them, however, so they just sat in the labs collecting dry-season dust. I figured the newborn girls’ club could find a better use for the computers at our local science resource center.

After getting permission from the headmaster, the girls club and I opened our school’s first-ever computer lab. We carried the cases, monitors, and peripherals to an old storage room, dusted them off, and fired them up. At each station sat at least two girls, one operating the keyboard, the other on the mouse, both looking at me wide-eyed and ready to learn.

I knew that none of them had ever touched a computer before, so I decided to start off slowly with the basics: a lesson on how to open and save files. That was my first mistake. Using the mouse and keyboard was so natural for me that I had never thought about teaching it to my students. My lesson plan was soon scrapped as I discovered how fundamental my teaching would have to be. I felt somewhat like a little league baseball coach, instructing the proper hand grip of the mouse and finger form on the keyboard. Although my students needed a good twenty minutes just to master the art of the double-click, they left the computer lab that day with a little more knowledge of the computer and a lot less fear of it.

The classes continued, one per week, as the girls discovered how to type their names (probably the all-time most popular lesson), how to launch programs, how to print, and even how to calculate sums and averages in a spreadsheet. They also studied definitions--ROM, RAM, and other acronyms--which are more important than ever now that their standardized graduation exam includes questions on computer literacy. Of course, I gave equal time for fun stuff as well. After each lesson, I would allow the girls an hour to do anything they wanted: paint digital pictures, browse a CD-ROM about dangerous African animals, or record impromptu songs through the computer’s microphone (which got me into a little trouble with the faculty, as I mentioned earlier).

Figure 3 The Girls Club visits Abiba (left), a secretary at the District Assembly, to learn how computers are used in the workplace.

Though my fantasies of turning the girls’ club members into computer geniuses have long since faded, together we accomplished some big projects. For example, the club put together a two-page magazine of original essays and poems that they typed themselves. I helped them format it newspaper-style and print copies for all of the club members. Later that year, we went on a field trip to the local District Assembly (the Ghanaian equivalent of a city hall) to learn how the secretaries use computers for writing reports and keeping track of the local government budget. After the tedious hunt-and-peck experience typing up the magazine, the girls were shocked and impressed when the secretaries gave a demonstration of touch-typing, their fingers flying across the keyboard.

Even if we had not pursued these projects, the most important goal was accomplished: The girls now have the desire to learn more about computers. Perhaps some of them will one day launch prosperous careers as consultants--not such a far-fetched idea ever since computer training institutes began popping up all over Ghana. If nothing else, they can go on to teach their children a little something about the world of computers.

Lessons Learned

• Don’t think you need a full-blown computer lab just to get started. Even a few computers can support around fifteen students if they triple-up. For larger numbers, you can teach the same lesson to different groups, or you can use the classes as a reward for good grades in school. (The best students are the ones who can do the most with computer literacy, anyway.) It’s not ideal, but it at least gives them exposure to computers and can take away the intimidation of technology that they might have had.
• Your lessons can never be too easy. You might think that a keyboard is simple once you explain what it does--you press a key and the letter appears--but what about capital letters? What does "Tab" mean? And why does the question mark key produce a slash instead? Remember: If it’s not obvious to your students, it’s not obvious.
• Classes without boys can make more of a difference than you might expect. I’ve discovered that when boys aren’t around, the girls ask more questions, help each other more often, and generally seem to enjoy themselves a bit more. They also have the opportunity to draw pictures, sing songs, and do other "girl stuff" (sorry) without fear of being mocked by the boys. In my classes, I try to promote any activity that shows the computer as more than just an electronic typewriter.
• Self-learning is, I believe, the best learning. At the end of each lesson, I like to quietly excuse myself and let the students use the computer on their own, without any teacher looming over them watching for mistakes. These days computers are quite forgiving about mess-ups; they can give a polite error message without crashing (usually). Students are free to make mistakes and correct them independently, so the computer is an ideal tool for self-learning.
• Beware of cultural traditions that might confuse your students. In Ghana, for instance, students often bring to school a "white board", which is a thin piece of wood about the size of a sheet of paper, with one side painted white and given a clear varnish. The students write on it in pencil, then erase it using a mixture of soap and water. It saves them money because they don’t need to buy paper for scratch work and practice problems. Naturally, my students carried this idea with them to computer class. Before shutting down for the day, they would carefully erase anything they didn’t want to save by holding down the backspace key. I had to explain that simply closing the document and not saving the text would erase it instantly.