Hello everyone,
We are thinking of introducing RACHEL to some primary and secondary schools in Laikipia County, Kenya. However, we have very little information and technical know-how of how to install and access RACHEL, infrastructure/equipment needed among others. Would appreciate any info on this. Thanks
Hello @bob_aston,
Welcome to the forums. For an overview of the RACHEL-Plus there’s a video here called RACHEL-Plus Overview where Jeremy has a covered most of the features available in RACHEL.
A basic overview is that the RACHEL-Plus is a device that provides a WIFI hotspot for users to connect to with devices like phones, tablets, and desktop computers. Once connected they can browse content installed to the RACHEL-Plus’ hard drive like Wikipedia, Khan Academy, and much more which is selected and installed by the administrator through a web interface. It has a battery which provides power when in areas that don’t have consistent power as well.
If you’re looking to use other hardware to run/install RACHEL it can get quite a bit more complicated than it is with the RACHEL-Plus. We do have the RACHEL images available for the Raspberry Pi at this post if you are looking at alternative hardware.
Hope this helps and please feel free to ask any questions.
James
Hi @bob_aston
We, The Thika Alumni Trust, have previously implemented RACHEL in Kiambu County and now tend to work with Internet-In-a-box (IIAB) with schools in Kiambu County. We use Raspberry Pi for desktops and typically implement a 50 desk environment in our selected schools. The IIAB Server concept enables us to make use of the government provided tablets in primary schools to access our IIAB provisioned servers enabling primary school pupils data that they just cannot access via their tablets. Most of our data in IIAB is similar to what James has highlighted above e.g. Khan Academy, Wikipedia, Health guides and thousand of books.
We are waiting for travel to Kenya open up again so we can address 3 school implementations that are outstanding from 2020.
We would certainly be interested in looking at your set-up whenever we can visit Kenya next e.g. understand what you use to access RACHEL data?
Happy to continue our conversations in the future as we seem to helping school children in Kenya
Thanks
Hi @bob_aston We use RACHEL-Pi in about 40 schools in Southern Province, Zambia. Recently, over the last ear or so we have set up several Primary schools with RACHEL-Pi and 5-10 Pi 400 workstations and 3 or 4 Laptops (for Teachers) with a large screen TV instead of a projector. This seems to work rather well. We would put more in but our budget is tight and we also have to put in the solar power to run the kit. I hope this is of help.
Kind Regards
Howard
I am based in Nairobi Kenya and have been training and deploying Rachel Plus in schools universities and villages for several years now. You could get in touch at mbogosam@gmail.com