The Interactive School Tablet, (ISTab) designed by a group of engineering students at Mansoura University, has won second prize in Injaz Egypt’s Scientific Achievement Competition. Injaz Egypt, an educational NGO, awarded the ten-member team L.E. 50,000 ($8,000) for the first Egyptian tablet used only for educational purposes.

“The project is a tablet allocated for learning purposes since its hardware’s design is devoid of all components irrelevant to the learning process, such as Bluetooth and GPS, in order to lower the product’s price,” said Khaled Attia, the Blink team leader.

The Interactive School Tablet, (ISTab) designed by a group of engineering students at Mansoura University, has won second prize in Injaz Egypt’s Scientific Achievement Competition. Injaz Egypt, an educational NGO, awarded the ten-member team L.E. 50,000 ($8,000) for the first Egyptian tablet used only for educational purposes.

“The project is a tablet allocated for learning purposes since its hardware’s design is devoid of all components irrelevant to the learning process, such as Bluetooth and GPS, in order to lower the product’s price,” said Khaled Attia, the Blink team leader.

ISTab includes newly developed educational applications. “We cannot compete in terms of the hardware design, but we could compete at the software level, even internationally,” Attia added.

Self-funding

ISTab differs from the locally assembled dual-cored tablet Inar – soon  to be placed on the market – in that it is the first tablet allocated for ad hoc learning purposes and has a quad-core (a chip with four independent units or cores that read and execute central processing instructions), which raises its efficiency with interactive learning programs.

The notion of the student tablet was not easily implemented as the team members have had to finance the project on their own. “Our project is self-funded since red tape in Egypt has prevented us from cashing the grant provided by the Scientific Research Academy. For example, in order to buy technical components unavailable in Egypt, we have to address the Ministry of Military Production to prove their unavailability in the Egyptian market, which takes a lot of time, in addition to other official procedures, forcing us to buy the components on our account,” Attia explained.

Useful educational applications

Since the project is basically intended to help students in their educational achievement, the team conducted field visits to schools to identify students’ need. They were able to develop more than twenty Android specialized applications, some of which operate on ‘augmented reality technology’ which allows interaction with textbooks, thus adding the video aspect to them, according to team member Mohammed Ali. “When Students level the tablet camera at the printed word ‘apple’, for example, they will see a picture of it on the screen, and secondary stage students can view the video of any physical experiment by only leveling the camera at the intended experiment photo in the textbook,” he added.

The team has also included electronic versions of the textbooks, facilitating search and studying and saving printing costs. The device also includes scheduling and student-teacher interaction applications. “We have developed an application that facilitates student-teacher communication difficulties and enables teachers to conduct yes-no surveys to learn the percentage of students who have not understood the lesson, thus saving them embarrassment before their classmates,”Ali said.

Outlook

“We will use the award money to fund a small enterprise in order to contact factories able to manufacture our tablet, to be experimented at schools, and we will also develop other products,” Ali explained.

The team will start by contacting international schools in Egypt through the Ministry of Education to introduce the tablet into the learning process.  If the project is proven successful, Blink will apply it in private schools and finally in public ones.