Tribewanted: Vorovoro

As some of you my know, I was one of a lucky few able to purchase one of the XO laptops as part of a “give one, get one” offer by the One Laptop Per Child project (see my previous blog here). This week, we had a lovely visit to the Mali District School. As usual, we presented book and gifts, enjoyed the amazing singing by the children, and had the whole school doing the Macarena as led by Kelly and Jillian. Angel had also brought with her letters from her classmates, so we split into three groups – classes 5 and 6 went with Kelly to finish up the pen friend letters they’d begin a couple of weeks prior, younger classes with Angel to do more pen letters, and I took classes 7 and 8 for computer lesson, as I’d done last February.

This time, however, I had a child-friendly, unique gift to share. We went over basics, like how to navigate a touch-pad and what it means to “reboot” (funny wht big step back you need to take when there is little context for our tech-heavy lingo). And then we jumped into using the video camera – first taking some photos and then a group video to test it out. We spent the rest of the class composing some fun music as a group with the TimTam Jam program. This project allows for many ways to learn about acoustics (reverb, tempo, etc) as well as basics of composition. And they were delighted to try out riffs using frog chirps along with percussion.

I hope to show more basics in the group setting before I go, and then we’ll test out a plan for pairing up kids to use the laptop two at a time. At the moment, there doesn’t seem to be wireless reception in Ligaulevu, but I’ll be testing it from different locations when we have a bit less rain. Stay tuned!