#globalcode

Ghana Week one

A week with David and Barry

Global code at Ghana in week number 1.
I'm loving this! This week was so incredibly awesome!

Preparing for school

In the weekend leading to the big first day with class we got to meet a bunch of
cool people. The teams going to other cities all had to fly through Accra.
Meeting all the volunteers, lamp-lighters (last year students now working as
teachers themselves) and people around the project. We got to see the city,
check out the different bits around the campus and just prepared for those first
lessons.

rain, monitors, keyboards and fun!

And then came day one. The lights-on moment. Like most things in life, not
everything ran the way we hoped it to be.

Shortly after we walked in to the classroom at around 08:30 the sky opened up
and surprised us with the heaviest rain I'd ever seen. Streets started filling
with water so there wasn't really a way for most students to reach the
classroom. Something as it turned out was pretty good as our raspberries
hadn't come in either and we only had 6 or so functioning monitors to work with.

So much rain!

This problem was (mostly) swiftly fixed and the first group of 10 students could
start to learn the first few bits of Raspbian (the OS that comes with the Pis)
and Linux. We pretty much continued to do that through the first two days.
On the second day however we did have a lot more students.

Once the raspberries were working, the energy got down a bit. Not everything was
perfect. Some of the screens didn't really work that well, we lacked a few
keyboards and raspberries don't like VGA cables. Normally the small machines are
connected to HDMI from which they eat a little bit of extra energy. The VGA
cables that we wired in (using VGA - HDMI adapters) were however taking energy
from the raspberries instead causing a shortage of energy and a whole lot of
shenanigans.

If I can change two things next year I'd take a bit more powerful power-adapter
(the 2A adapters we had were not keeping up) as well as a practical thing. Once
the background is set that "lights on" (this little small credit card machine is
a computer realization) is gone. Building a quick html page and pushing it to
Heroku is just such a big motivator of "wow, I'm building my own stuff now!"

Anyway, the lessons were on their way and Michael Soli -- one of the people
working at the uni, running a software company in town -- was an amazing guy
setting us up with better equipment as well as loads of help in and outside the
class (thanks Michael!)

Once most of the students were done setting up their machines and doing the
bash-crash course we continued with STICKERS!. I had taken along an envelope
full of stickers from some book-stores in Sweden. The class went bananas with
them, dressing up their new Raspberry Pi cases.

Stickers maketh personal

And that brings me to day three; the day we started
python development. Sure there were still some new faces, but the classes and
labs were now on their way. Barry took the first two days and explained the ins
and outs of the Python programming language with Me and David running around
fixing the small little typo's here and there. Barry did a stellar job
explaining the different things with an amazing depth into the "why's of
things".

These days were a bit tough as students needed to dig through all kinds of
theory, learn loops, etc. Halfway through day 4 we renewed most of that energy
with an assignment.

Working on the assignment

On day four the students had to choose to make their own weather app, news app,
distance helper, etc. in small groups. They presented the results with much
pride on Thursday morning, after which we did a few more lessons in which we
went over version control through Git.

After the theoretical material on Thursday it was about time to start doing some
weird coding again. The subject: Make sound and (traffic) lights using Python
and the small GPIO pins on the raspberry pi. The results were awesome!
We had students programming beeping machines, traffic lights, discos, you name
it. Thursday and Friday were probably the hardest days to get people out of the
room (they would also sneak into the class early so they could start coding
already).

Making traffic lights

The weekend

And with that our classes ended for the week. Time to explore town. We started
at Sam's place in Osu and slowly made our way to Jamestown, visiting monuments,
markets, coconut places and cafés on the way. Accra is a living city and amazing
to be around in. After our long walk we made our way to a small restaurant in
town called Zen garden, had a beer, bit of a goodbye and off we went to the
airport were Barry would hop onto an airplane (after eating a pizza).

Last pic at Jamestown

Sunday, the last day I'll cover in this weekly was nice. It was a bit weird to
no longer have Barry around, but the breakfast with Sam & James (a guy that had
arrived as Barry left) was nice and the Meetup I had with Emerald (one of the
lamp-lighters) after just incredibly awesome.
It was nice to be able to drop some of the books, notes and
resources I had for front-end development on someone else. She was (and is)
just incredibly experienced with Adobe XD; something I haven't really tried yet.
Plus she's a really nice person to be around with. Thanks Emerald!

Up to the next week with Athena, A Morgan Stanley employee and volunteer sharing
the teacher role with us next week!