Janakalyan Secondary School



About THE sCHOOL





Shree Janakalyan Secondary school is a higher secondary school established in 2025 B.S. and has a total of 1,177 students in 2017. The school is 5-hour drive from Kathmandu valley, next to a popular touristic destination known as Daman. The school is publicly owned and has twenty classrooms. Electricity is available 24 hours a day. After the earthquake of 2015 destroyed most of the school’s infrastructure it is slowly constructing the building with funds received from donors. The school currently has an operational computer lab with 13 terminals with LCD monitors. Currently it teaches two computer classes each 45 minutes long for 4,6 and 7th grades. However, due to the large student population the computers are hardly enough to provide computer lessons effectively to all its students. As such, eBlackboard teamed with RCKW to expand the computer services to this school.



Project Partner





Rotary Club of Kathmandu West (RCKW) is a social, non-political, not-for-profit charitable organization working under the aegis of Rotary International. It is one of the most active Rotary Clubs in the RI District 3292. It was very instrumental in designing and providing low cost temporary housing made of tin sheets to the families devastated by the 2015 earthquake. The club was quick to establish earthquake relief distribution center in Bhaktapur immediately after the earthquake. To date RC of KTM West has established three labs in partnership with eBlackboard and this school marks the fourth and the largest implementation in terms of number of terminals.



Key SPONSORS





The key sponsors for this project are Anish and Annika Bhadra from Philadelphia, USA. Both are school students and are children of Ashish and Shweta. They were very motivated to contribute towards the betterment of education in the remote schools of Nepal, as they realized the contrast in the quality of resources available for learning purpose in those schools compared to what they have in the USA. With this voluntary work they are hoping to motivate other students like them to donate to schools who don't have enough resource and funds to improve the quality of education. They purchased 12 sets of Raspberry Pi computers, tested them and took it to Nepal to hand it over to RC of Kathmandu West (Project Partner). Bista Sewa Samiti, a local social organization, also contributed NRs.25K towards the purchase of monitors and accessories.



The implementation



INSTALLATION & TRAINING TEAM



MANMOHAN
SHRESTHA


PRESIDENT (RCKW)


Rajesh
KAYASTHA



IMMEDIATE PAST-PRESIDENT (RCKW)



DIGBIJAY
BISTA



PRESIDENT-ELECT (RCKW)





RC of Kathmandu West purchased twelve 15.5" LCD monitors, UPS and accessories such as keyboards, mice and headphones locally and made arrangements for transportation. The picture on the left shows the handover of equipment by the President of the Rotary Club to the Principal of the beneficiary school amidst the Handover Ceremony. The twelve sets of Raspberry Pi computers were handed over by Anish and Annika, sponsors from USA, to RCKW on April 12th so they could perform final system testing in Kathmandu, prior to installation in the school.





After five hours drive to Thaha-3, Palung of Makwanpur district the installation team led by Digbijay Bista of RCKW reached the school around 11AM on April 17, 2019. After the award ceremony for high-school graduates and the cultural programs ended, which lasted two hours the installation process was initiated with help of school staff and volunteers from RCKW. The installation completed after an hour and the RCKW provided a brief training on how to activate and use ePaath tool and on the maintenance of computer equipment, specially during load shedding. The school Principal provided Token of Love and Certificates to the Project Partner representatives and the sponsors (US and Nepal) of the project during the handover ceremony.





The installation basically consisted of connecting the monitors to the HDMI port of the Raspberry Pi computer through the HMDI-VGA converter and connecting the mouse and keyboards to its USB ports. An audio splitter cable was provided to allow two headphones to connect to each Raspberry Pi. This allowed two students to listen to the educational tool in each computer terminal, effectively doubling the size of students who could learn simultaneously.





All 12 terminals, loaded with ePaath content were ready to go an hour and half after the installation started! The terminals were powered by grid electricity supply which was hooked to the UPS. In case of power disruption the UPS will start giving out the warning signal. The students will get about 15 minutes to shutdown all the terminals. This will safeguard the operating system as well as the ePaath software loaded in the microSD card.






Since by the time the installation, testing and brief training to the few school staff on how to maintain the computer equipment during load shedding was completed, it was well over 4pm. As such all the students had left for the day and there were nobody available to test the computers. However, since the new school session had just started from April 15, there were lot of students who were excited to try their hands on the new sets of computer systems in the newly designed computer lab! Altogether, more than 36 students could use the lab at any one time, making it a very productive computing time for them.



the implementation was a success




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