CMU Students Intern in Africa

Students from Carnegie Mellon University’s Pittsburgh and Qatar campuses returned Tuesday from a ten-week internship in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The interns worked at the Uhuru Mchanganyiko (mah-chan-gahn-eek-o) Public School, providing mobile technology services for social workers, students, and visually impaired children. CMU students from the United States, Qatar, and Sri Lanka worked together to design a cell phone application that will help social workers track down missing or at-risk children; an English-teaching cell phone game for teachers and students; and an update of a Braille program that fits the needs of Swahili-speaking Tanzanian natives.

CMU student Brad Hall says he oversaw the revamping of the Braille Tutor program, which uses a “slate and stylus system” to teach Braille electronically. Among the changes he and his team made were translating all text to Swahili, building an audio menu for easy navigating, and designing a popular game called “Music Maker” that allowed visually impaired students to make songs using Braille. Hall says these sorts of Braille programs are necessary because Tanzanian law requires that visually impaired students attend the same schools and classes as sighted children. He says laws like this make classes in schools like Uhuru (“freedom,” in Swahili) very diverse – and difficult to teach. “The school we worked at, Uhuru School, is one of the largest schools in Dar es Salaam. It has about 900 children, 90 of whom are visually impaired. It also hosts students who are mentally and physically challenged, and they have 12 deaf-blind students,” says Hall.

He says that cities like Dar es Salaam are far from what some Westerners might think when they picture Africa. “It’s certainly not undeveloped. Y’know, a lot of times people think of Africa, and they think of wilderness and people living in shacks, and that may be true for parts of Tanzania, but that’s certainly not true for all of Dar es Salaam. They have high-rise buildings, and they have electricity, and a running water system that has problems, but is still working,” says Hall.