Intel and Intel Foundation released an insightful report on MakeHers and the role of making in engaging girls and women in technology. The report explores why girls make, their role in the maker movement, as well as statistics on the number of girls and women engaged in making.(As well as why they are underrepresented in… Read more »
Author: Juliet Wanyiri
Foondi Workshops,
Kenya -
Juliet Wanyiri is the founder of Foondi Workshops which runs collaborative design workshops with the aim of capacity building and skills sharing. The larger vision is to build a community of local African technology innovators who build solutions targeting underserved and emerging markets. Prior to this, Juliet was the lead instigator of Gearbox - Kenya's first open space for rapid prototyping, smallscale fabrication and design.She was also part of the engineering team behind BRCK. She was also one of the founding members of the FabLab Robotics Outreach Program which she has lead collaboratively for the last five years. This project took the third place position for the IEEE Presidents' Change The World Award 2013. Juliet is both and organiser and alumni of the International Development Design Summit (IDDS) - an annual design and innovation summit organised by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) D-Lab. Juliet is passionate about leveraging both engineering and design to collaboratively build solutions for emerging markets.
Wood block phone charger workshop in Uganda
On Saturday afternoon, Yvette and I headed to Mpigi in Uganda which is about an hour from the capital, Kampala. Watoto Church Vocation Training Institutein Mpigi is based at the heart of a village and is home to hundreds of students, most of whom are orphans and some of whom come from the nearby villages. Many… Read more »
Building a bici-blender
What’s the one type of transport you can find in any part of the world? A bike? That’s right. Now Foondi Workshops is rethinking how we can use bicycles in emerging markets where access to reliable and affordable energy remains out a reach for thousands of people. Foondi held a hands-on design workshop on building a… Read more »
How and why we are all the ‘creative type’
Paulo Freire, in his book entitled The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, highlights the effects of oppression, based on his background and the challenges he faced in reconciling his Brazilian tradition and culture with the new educational environment brought about by colonization. This brings into the limelight two clear ideas: the loss of identity and humanity… Read more »
Mindstorms Commentary
Commentary on Mindstorms by Seymour Papert: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas “Certain uses of very powerful computational technology and computational ideas can provide children with new possibilities for learning, thinking, and growing emotionally as well as cognitively.” Reading Papert’s Mindstorm shed light on several parallels between the learning environment in 1980 when the… Read more »