BRP-Africa
BRP was invited to teach in Dakar, Senegal and we traveled there last year where we began working with two schools, implementing a tech curriculum, and transferring equipment to enhance learning environments. Our goal is to build practical foundational skills for students to utilize to solve problems in their communities. Check here for our progress below as we build throughout the African Diaspora.
SABS/MAXIQ
In January 2022 BRP started a month long teaching residency at the Senegalese American Bilingual School, thanks to a successful capital campaign. The SoulBot Saturday Design Squad curriculum was retooled for implementation by the SABS faculty to integrate into their pedagogical model. Coding platforms and robotics projects were deployed for students in all grade levels. The capstone project of the residency was the creation of Satellite team comprised of SABS high school students to assemble a MaxIQ.Space cube satellite, which will be launched this spring (2023) by BluShift Aerospace. The retooled coding curriculum was translated into French by SABS administrator Cheikh Oumar Ba, who is our project partner in Dakar.
DJARAMA
BRP traveled to Touba Dialaw, about an hour south of Dakar, to set up laptop computers (repurposed courtesy Futuremakers and Matt Barinholtz) in L'Ecole du Dialaw's computer lab. The operating system we are using is the Endless OS, a linux based distribution that is a complete learning environment that does not require internet connectivity, allowing the students to use a local copy of wikipedia for research, coding and office software in French with no 'digital divide'.
Rasilimali
RASILIMALI is the Swahili word for resources, and it applies to all of Africa. Of the many things that have inspired BRP in Africa, watching a village pull in their fishing nets together has stayed with us constantly. Seeing the community work to separate the fish, rinse them off and divide for everyone to take a share on their land, their water, and knowing that this way of life is about to be destroyed by a new shipping port, as well Chinese and European fishing trawlers that literally pull thousands of fish everyday out of the ocean angers us to no end. Working in an egalitarian manner, taking enough to feed folks but not disrupt the ocean's ecosystem....that to BRP seems worth protecting, and we have spent the past year working on an action plan. In alignment with UN Sustainability Goals, we are currently building out the process and tools that will create a co-hort of community based Eco-engineers to compile environmental impact data regarding water and soil quality in Touba Dialaw. Contact us to see how you can support this effort!