Two weeks before my leave out of Cambodia we deployed a computer room in a rural school here in Cambodia. The deployment is part of a serie of pilot projects of the Masterplan for ICT in Education. This Masterplan is written by the Ministry of Education, and will contain plans to introduce ICT in the Cambodian education system. One of the objectives of this plan is to teach ICT to 10th grade students. There are 315 upper secondary schools in Cambodia, so they need to be equipped with computers. Part of my work has been to prepare plans and research technologies for deployment of computers in upper secondary schools. One particular problem in Cambodia is the availability and price of electricity. A major newspaper in Cambodia cited last year that only 17% of rural Cambodia is connected to the power grid. Since many rural power supply companies are privately owned, the price is often prohibitively high. On many places electricity costs around $1,- per KWh (US dollars that is!). So we have made sure that the computers have a very low power consumption. The computers you see on the picture below only use around 20 Watts, which is about 20% of a typical desktop setup.



All the software on the computers are in Khmer language. We have trained the teachers in teaching ICT, and there are training materials in Khmer available. All the software is free and open. The operating system in openSUSE Linux, and there is an office suite in Khmer, OpenOffice (there are no other office suites available in Khmer) and  various educational programs have been installed, like the desktop globe program Marble (an open source alternative for Google Earth). I also made sure there are some games on it (not very educational, but hey, what did you use your computer for when you were in highschool?). The fact that it is in Khmer makes it easier for the teachers to maintain, and easier for the students to understand. Using Khmer language software means that the speed of teaching can be much much faster as there is no language barrier. See on the picture below how interested the teachers are!



Finally, we made sure that the software can be installed and maintained very easily. With help of a program called Kiwi, we made a bootable USB stick, with a program called partimage. This program can deploy exact copy of a harddisk to an other computer, and it takes no more than 10 minutes. So installation is a question of pressing the button! And in the future, when the computers have software problems, the only thing needed is boot from USB stick, press the button, wait 10 minutes, and the computer is in its' original state again! And all this with free software!