Archive for October, 2008
Blog Action Day: Poverty
October 15th is Blog Action Day and the topic is poverty, so I thought I would post on some activities we have been up to in regards to raising awareness of the need for better education in developing countries. Better education is a key enabler to improving people’s situations.
Two weeks ago we held our first “Engineering 4 Health Challenge” at UVic and it was a great success — the local high school students came together to think about and develop paper designs for health applications that would run on the OLPC. The ideas were fantastic, providing interesting ways to improve education on health.
It also allowed me, in my way, to support a colleague who spent 10 months last year in Tanzania treating and educating the population there on HIV and AIDS.
We will be continuing these Engineering 4 Health Challenges later this year with more local high school students and in early 2009 with University students. It is a great way to get people being creative about a real problem.