M4Girls

M4Girls: Empowering Female Students

Posted by AnneryanHeatwole on Feb 23, 2010

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M4Girls: Empowering Female Students data sheet 5485 Views

The following is the executive summary of M4Girls, prepared by the Mindset Network and Neil Butcher and Associates, and reprinted here with permission from Mindset.

Introduction

The M4girls project is a partnership between Nokia, Mindset Network, and the Department of Education (North West Province/South Africa) to test the provision of educational content on a mobile phone platform to girl learners. The project targeted the development of Mathematics competencies in Grade Ten girl learners from underserved communities, and aimed to empower girl learners in the following ways:

• Access to mathematics (as a pilot subject area and driven by priority areas in education in South Africa);

• Exposure to a complementary platform of curriculum-aligned Mathematics content (Mindset content) on mobile phones; and

• Exposure to technology in the form of mobile phones.

Basic Information
Website URL: 
http://mobile.engadget.com/200...
Organization involved in the project?: 
Nokia
Project goals: 

The project aimed to:

  • Increase female students' aptitude with mathematics
  • Expose female students to technology through mobile phones
Brief description of the project: 

The M4girls project is a partnership between Nokia, Mindset Network, and the Department of Education (North West Province) to test the provision of educational content on a mobile phone platform to girl learners. The project targeted the development of Mathematics competencies in Grade Ten girl learners from underserved communities in South Africa, and aimed to empower girl learners. 

Target audience: 

The target audience is grade 10 girls in the North West Province of South Africa. 

Detailed Information
Length of Project (in months) : 
8
Status: 
Ended/Complete
What worked well? : 

Whilst learners’ reports during the focus groups point to the phones mainly being used to listen to music, other general benefits of having access to a cell phone such as Internet access and communication were noted, and this made learners more confident and technologically savvy. During the interviews, it was observed that learners displayed a sense of accomplishment as they described proficiency in using various phone functions. Thus, exposure to technology in the form of cell phones was well received by the MP group. Positive attitudes towards using technology for learning, together with the reports of high cell phone usage (by both educators and learners), indicate the potential of using cell phones for e-learning or m-learning.

 

What did not work? What were the challenges?: 

Although changes were detected in attitudes towards technology on the part of learners during the project, the findings of this pilot was that there was no significant change in attitudes towards technology and school as a direct result of the technology used by the MP group in the project, given that post-project results for both the comparison and MP groups were generally quite similar. That, is whilst perceptions of technology were enhanced, these perceptions improved across both the MP and comparison group and the extent to which the M4girls project alone contributed to this is unclear.