Why Nobody Uses the Tablets

Tablets and a learning platform have been given to students at the local school. The money is spent and the equipment is there.

Adoption has stalled. The project names three reasons: teachers are unwilling to push usage because it is extra work on top of an existing load, the electricity supply is unreliable, and the internet is inconsistent.

Expensive hardware is going unused, so the educational benefit is not happening and the story told to donors is not true. Both of those matter to the project.

Because the usual fix is to ask teachers to try harder, and teachers already have a full day. Any solution resting on goodwill will work for three weeks and then stop. The project is explicit that it wants a system that does not depend on teacher goodwill alone.

There is also a real possibility nobody has tested: that the stated reasons are not the actual reasons. Nobody has done the diagnosis.

• Branch — CS and IT for the software and monitoring, Electronics for power and connectivity. Also suits students who want research and fieldwork.
• Technical skills — Offline-first content delivery, local caching and syncing, low-power and battery-backed systems, usage logging and analysis, Android device management.
• Other skills — Structured root-cause investigation, interviewing people who may not tell you the real reason, designing a pilot, reporting an unwelcome finding.