One of our local Ethiopian mentors recently visited our teammates over at Saint Joseph School in Addis Ababa. We sent with him the required components (including Arduinos) that our sister school will need to recreate the system. These components can allow our Ethiopian teammates to slowly work on replicating the system themselves, therefore strengthening and deepening their understanding of our project. We also sent them InvenTeam shirts from Lemelson-MIT.
The Ethiopian team consists of about 8 students, mostly 10th and 11th graders, and two faculty advisers. The team’s initial reaction was excitement over the Arduinos. They wanted to begin coding and assembling the components right away! One student already familiar with Arduino even inquired about potentially contributing additional coding to aid the efficiency and compatibility of the system.
He also updated our teammates on the progress of our project by showing video clips of our engineering meetings from our blog. The students and teachers presented great questions and suggestions. One teacher pointed out the cultural challenges of implementing a pedestrian alert system in a society that has never had such technology before. Another mentioned involving technology faculty from the Addis Ababa University to assist with implementation of the project. The team was overall very enthusiastic about the project’s future.
The Saint Joseph teammates were very excited about the progress the project has made and mentioned several other engineering experts they wanted to get involved. We are so appreciative to have their help and they are very eager to get the system on the streets!
-LL
