LUSAKA, Zambia -- Rachel Ngongola's second grade class at the Tico Community School is learning to count multiples of 10 on a Wednesday morning in late July. The class of 30 is divided into three groups: one counts clusters of plastic bottle caps, one scribbles addition problems into lined paper notebooks and a third sprawls across the floor, huddled in groups of two around white tablet computers.
Ngongola controls the classroom with ease. You won't catch her shushing her students, or reminding them to focus on the lesson. While other Tico teachers describe Ngongola -- known to her students as Teacher Rachel -- as an exceptional educator, she hasn't always engaged her students with such ease. Her classroom's cool composure arrived with the five white ZEduPad tablets one year earlier, when Tico became one of seven Lusaka schools to pilot the iSchool curriculum.
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These primary schools in the Zambian capital, along with eight schools in the country's rural Eastern Province, are the first to implement iSchool's innovative approach to education. The Zambian startup, founded in 2011 by British serial entrepreneur Mark Bennett, is the first in the world to bring e-learning to vernacular languages. It's innovative first-through-seventh grade curriculum, fully translated into eight local Zambian languages as well as English, offers complete primary school coursework.
"We've taken the entire Zambian primary curriculum, mapped every single subject and every single grade, and created a very detailed lesson plan for the teacher for every single lesson," Bennett told Mashable. "All the lessons are appropriate for people in the villages -- there are no skyscrapers and pizza parlors."
The ZEduPad (Zambians refer to their country as "Zed") is a high-quality, low-cost, seven-inch Android tablet, which comes pre-loaded with all the entire iSchool curriculum in 32GB of flash memory. It doesn't require an Internet connection, though it can be used if one is present.
Classrooms using iSchool, like Ngongola's, are always divided into three groups of students: one working on an activity with the teacher, one working on a writing exercise and one working on the computers. This addresses Zambia's overfilled classroom challenge, breaking students into small enough groups to receive adequate attention from their teachers. One lesson consists of all three activities; Ngongola's students will rotate through the computer program, the addition drills and the bottle cap counting stations.
iSchool's total learning environment includes 5,500 primary school lessons, a one-year training curriculum for teachers and an adult literacy program anyone can complete at his or her own pace, with purchase of a tablet.
"Even if the teacher is reading off the script, we've moved them from rote learning to questioning, interactive-based learning," Bennett says. "I'm not just telling you some facts."
What differentiates iSchool from other education tablets created for use in the developing world, such as the Aakash 2, One Laptop Per Child XO tablet and the Intel Studybook, is the company's focus was on creating a solid curriculum first and a technology product second.
Like most other education systems in Africa (and western education of the 16th century), most learning in Zambia is conducted by rote: A teacher makes a statement and students repeat it. Not surprisingly, functional literacy rates are staggeringly low: somewhere between 10 and 20% of the population is able to read.
In addition to the challenge of overfilled classrooms, iSchool's curriculum addresses other major systemic roadblocks: the country lacks educated teachers and students have to travel long distances to get to school. Half of the country's population is under 15, meaning the government struggles to fill the growing demand for school teachers. According to iSchool, 85% of teachers in community schools are untrained.
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Over the past two years, Bennett has invested $4 million into the company, employing 250 people as curriculum writers, translators and technologists. Though large-scale adoption is still underway, countries throughout the region, including South Africa, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya and Lesotho, have expressed interest. There's also hope to use iSchool to rebuild South Sudan and Somalia's education system from scratch. Outside of the continent, educators in the UK have noticed iSchool's work and expressed interest.
The ZEduPad goes on sale this month, and will be available in a flagship store in a Lusaka mall, as well as through a special sales center. The fully-loaded device costs about $220. iSchool thinks this cost is affordable, calculated to be roughly $1 per student per month in average-sized schools.
Zoe Fox traveled to Zambia on a global health fellowship from the International Reporting Project