I didn’t know how else to get hold of you so please forgive me ‘hijacking’ your blog.

You may remember back to 2005 signing off, on behalf of The Shuttleworth Foundation, a entrepreneurship development sponsorship called the Ka-Ching! Business Parenting programme, where parents take an active role helping their own children develop business skills.

I am happy to say the investment has allowed us to move forward, for which I am extremely thankful. The programme has expanded into schools as well now. Your old school ‘Wetpups’ being one of the schools that has really embraced it.

You maybe aware that the Department of Education is embarking on an e-Education drive - but their deadline is 10 December 2007!

What I want to do is make the EMS curriculum come alive through Ka-Ching! I want to take the burden off the teacher and inspire them. I mean how can a 50 something year old teacher with no business experience possibly excite their learners. But they need to! Sooner or later children around the country will have to use business skills or intra-preneurship skills developed at school.

The EMS curriculum is a start, but it needs to take some major steps forward. Learners need to become excited about business and develop practical and real-life skills. This is what our country truly needs!

I want to pitch to the DoE and specifically for becoming the preferred service provider for the e-Education initiative for EMS, so that every classroom, teacher and child all around the country start to develop the business skills they will HAVE to have in the not so distant future.

My technical skills are ok but I could do with some direction? I thought we could reach the classrooms either via the web, ’smart board’ technology or some other means?

I am hoping for some advice or contacts of good people to talk to, so that this can become a reality. But the deadline is threatening so I would need to act really soon!

If you have any ideas, please could you drop me an email info@ka-chingworld.com or call me in Cape Town on 021-843-3048 or my cell +27741126421.

Thanks for your time!

Greg Bunyard

The word ‘curriculum’ sounds like an imposed system but right throughout the discussions we were reminded that this ‘curriculum’ must not be imposed but rather inspired. To me the general idea was to create software/workbooks that will encourage teachers to explore the idea of teaching analytical skills with the use of a programming language. It certainly couldn’t be imposed in a country like South Africa at present anyway as comparitively few schools have a computer lab and many schools don’t even have electricity. It seemed to me that we were looking at a new and innovative way of teaching our children to solve problems.

Because they are growing up in a technological age, it would seem natural to use technology as a tool to learning. The word ‘viral’ was used often in the discussions, which I took to mean that the ‘curriculum’ would be open-ended and would be developed to ‘inspire’ rather than ‘restrict’ children and teachers. To my way of thinking, this ‘curriculum’ would be used to inspire the use of programming to enhance learning (particularly in problem solving skills) and also to inspire schools in South Africa to ‘get on board’ and demand that their schools have computer labs so that they can start using these ideas to help develop their pupils to their full potential. The aim was to develop children not to ‘bind’ them into a hard and fast way of learning.

I use Logo to teach children from the age of 6 and run three Logo Clubs at my school. I find that there is no way that I can restrict children from developing at their own rate. They have wonderful ideas and it would be a great pity to use a hard and fixed ‘curriculum’. They love to experiment and discover for themselves and the ‘curriculum’ or ‘guidelines’ should take this into account.

This ‘curriculum’ could be used by teachers and parents and is certainly not restricted to schools. I have taught my own grandchildren Logo programming at home and two of them have learnt Squeak on their own and are now into other languages. Paul should greet this innovative project with enthusiasm not negativity.