Web Skills at Kasturbi Gandhi Balika Vidhyalay School for Girls

In May 2018, a group of us had the great privilege to conduct an HTML/CSS workshop at the Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalay School for Girls in Labang, West Sikkim, India. The KGBV schools are a special program of the national Government of India aimed at educating girls from poor and disadvantaged backgrounds; in West Sikkim, the school serves approximately 200 girls between the ages of 12 and 16, mostly from very poor backgrounds. The workshop was a great success, and we would like to explore a deeper and more sustained relationship.

There are over 3,000 KGBV schools in India, but only one in the state of Sikkim, where University of Toronto professors have an ongoing research project. This location is of particular interest because of its location on what might be called "the edge of the Internet". Internet access in rural West Sikkim is currently only possible through cellular telephone signals. Because of the extremely hilly topography of Sikkim, which lies entirely within the Himalayan mountain range, cell service tends to be somewhat unreliable. However, fiberoptic cable is being laid in the district and over the next several years Internet access wil expand dramatically. The district is also replete with small businesses, many in the tourism trade; a substantial fraction of these businesses have no web precence at all. There is very limited web development expertise in the region.

Our goal is to create and teach a web development curriculum appropriate to the region and the demographic we're working with. Key challenges will certianly include:

• Hardware Decisions: On our initial trip, we ran all services from a Raspberry Pi 3, using an 8gb SD card & a commodity case & power supply. We need to decide whether this is the best vehicle for the environment, based on an asseessment not only of function, but of durability and repairability. It's also possible that we will want to take advnatage of mesh networking nodes.
• Software Decisions: To enable local web development in the absence of a stalbe Internet connection, we ran local instances of [jsbin](https://jsbin.com} (github), Apache, Wordpress, and other services, with local copies of resources such as jQuery, etc. The implementation was very hacky and somewhat unstable, and required substantial experise to troubleshoot. It will take substantial work to transform this into an easy-to-use utility.
• Pedagogical Decisions: The most exciting part of the project (for @titaniumbones at least) is coming up with curricula for students and also for their teachers, who at present do not themselves have much experience with web development or languages ushc as HTML, CSS, and javascript. This will be a multi-stage process and will certainly involve feedback from the students themselves.

Planning and Reference Documents

• Project Planning Board
• Project Requirements and Guiding Concerns (draft)
• Trip Guide (draft)

Project Timeline and Key Dates

We imagine this inital phase of the project lasting from October 2018 - March 2019.

How We Work

Tasks and deadlines are tracked using a planning board in this GitHub repo. We use Slack and co-work in-person weekly Mondays from 1-3 pm.