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Shepherd Chimururi Youth Interactive Correspondent
Over 1000 local students from 30 schools are participating in the technological exchange that has connected them to global friends under the auspices of USA based Level Up the Village organisation.
Already three schools namely Petra, Wise Owl and Tynwald primary schools have benefited after receiving 3D printers after taking in a programme to build a technology device that could save energy and coming up with a solution to provide lighting when electricity is gone.
The students first made solar lights designs using AutoCad then later printed them using 3D printers.
Level Up Village was first introduced in by Zimbabwe in March 2017 by Ronald Nyamukuwa who is the director of Ronne Ishalt which runs the local franchise of Level Up.
He is now doubling up as the Instructor and Regional manager of Level Up Village franchise.
Level Up Village is a global platform which provides an array of learning and sharing opportunities for students across the world to pair and learn together.
The most important aspects of Level Up Village is that students interact and learn from each other as it allows and promotes softer skills such as collaborative learning, critical thinking, creativity and communication.
This sounds like globalisation of the classroom by learning under one platform and learning the same things at the same time.
In an interview with Youth Interactions Nyamukuwa, who was voted the second run up of the National Leadership and management Excellence year 2020 Awards organized by the Zimbabwe Institute of Management for the under 30 said Level Up Village allows students from various parts of the world to partner and work on a project together through the guidance of a teacher.
“After almost two years of building confidence in the market, the project started shaping up in the designed frame and by the time of writing of this article, over 1000 children have signed up for a course each term and are connected to an international student. LuvToCode holiday program is what they did last time. The other event local students participated in was themed The Global Coding Course: Student Voices from Zimbabwe and Greenwich and it included student presentations of websites built during a four-week course in HTML and CSS.
The themes included student empowerment and student voices, global disruption to education: student voices from
Harare, Zimbabwe, and Greenwich. Students talked about ways they tried to stay connected to friends, active in sports and the arts, and entertained to pass the time. They also described all the things they had each done to overcome challenges to learning. In this regard, they understood how much they valued being able to carry on with their education remotely,” he explained.
On the positive impact Level Up Village is doing to our education system Nyamukuwa added, ‘Level Up Village came into Zimbabwe at a time when the Government had just restructured it curriculum and ICT has been put forward as a key pillar in the new curriculum.
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