Itinerary School Station

In today's world, millions of children still do not have access to quality education. Many of them lack proper infrastructure, learning materials or qualified teachers. Besides, local and regional educational systems need to provide the infrastructure for students to optimize students' learning activities that match both their skills and their aspirations. But this not always happen, especially in communities with scarce economic resources to make investments in education.

As an effort to bridge opportunities among vulnerable communities lacking access to schools, UNICEF started a project called MobiStation, a portable multimedia device kit powered by solar energy that can be equipped with an internet router, low-power projector, and audio system, designed to be carried and temporarily installed in classrooms with no access to the internet and/or electricity.

This project enables students to make use of ICT and provides students with better access to learning opportunities. For teachers, the appliance of ICT tools in daily school life may be beneficial when it comes to lesson planning or demonstrations, once some learning processes can work better when shown in motion pictures. In addition, this solution could deliver a more inclusive educational method, where children with certain disabilities such as blindness or deafness, could equally participate and take advantage of the learning process, overcoming previous barriers as the tool can be personalized according to student's individual needs, such as delivering integrating Talking Books in the classroom.

How Itinerary School Stations Work?

Even though many countries worldwide have dramatically increased access to schooling in recent years, higher enrollment has failed to improve learning for all students. These itinerary school stations, on the other hand, promise to become an encouraging tool to embed a more inclusive educational ecosystem to better target and reach low-income regions.

These education digital boxes can be filled with laptops, tablets or audiobook readers, preloaded with educational content, becoming a very useful tool for low-income communities. Mobile stations could as well be used to project school books, teaching videos, and other digital materials in a wide range of environments by providing specific online or offline content to compliment the school curriculum. In addition, Micro-leaning Platforms could be embedded in the system, thus augmenting learning possibilities.

Online courses could be created by the school or offered by other institutes or platforms. This increases the number of opportunities for students to acquire knowledge in subjects that are not currently available at their school (e.g., advanced computer science, language courses), and it allows students who are falling behind to take on extra remedial courses to reduce their knowledge gap without that particular school incurring high costs.

Future Perspectives

Education remains one of the areas that have faced less structural changes in the past decades. To promote more democratic learning environments, holistic approaches such as itinerary school stations could effectively reorient the educational system towards more beneficial learning outcomes, especially for foundational knowledge.

These stations could be a bridge to improve distinct educational aspects in developing countries, increasing their schooling system quality as a whole. They could reduce the cost of education and at the same time provide different content models, once the devices can be filled with updated information coherent with their own culture. In adversarial situations such as bad weather or poor health conditions, the difficulty of getting to school may be overcome by the possibility of virtual meetings through individual electronic devices.

In the future, the model of itinerary schools could evolve with the help of VR tools, thus becoming VR Classrooms with simulated environments presenting new settings and time periods for teaching biology and history. VR Classrooms would, ultimately, enable the creation of entire virtual environments, such as simulated museums filled with distinct or even impossible inputs, like extinct animals, foreign plants, or entire cities. Students could experience their favorite shows, academic settings, or amusement parks with all inputs necessary to provide a fully immersive space.