South Africa’s Department of Education is piloting a new education project that uses popular mobile social network MXit to deliver mathematics tutorials to Grade 10 learners.
The “Imfundo Yethu Imfundo Yami” project is a joint venture between the country’s Department of Education, Nokia South Africa and SAFIPA (a funding portal managed by the Finnish Embassy in South Africa).
260 grade 10 learners from six selected schools in Gauteng, the North West and the Western Cape Provinces will participate in the pilot project.
Says Greg van Schalkwyk, principal of the Cape Academy: “MXit is used by 99% of the learners at my school. Learners will receive 15 questions on the MXit channel, and we will be able to see how they tackle problems to find mathematical solutions”.
Herman Heunis, CEO of MXit says, “MXit is used by 12 million individuals both locally and internationally and six million of them are learners. The partnership has therefore chosen MXit to hosting this initiative, as it’s already very familiar to young people. A special channel on MXit has been created for this purpose and access to this channel is free for learners,” Heunis continues.
The project is a continuation of efforts from Nokia initiated in January 2008, in partnership with Mindset and the North West Department of Education, to pilot mathematics games and videos for Grade 10 learners.
MXit is used by 12 million individuals!!!!!!!! wow this is interesting .
The children of the present generation are more inclined to computer based activities than the traditional ones. The old educational activities are hardly interesting to most young children anymore. We should realize that present computer technology has integrated almost everything we like in life into the computer and networks. Games, music, chatting, easy available resources like audios, videos and readable materials at the best convenience. The use of MXit should be very appropriate to making learning more interesting and most probably this system will eventually be standard throughout the world.