The first ever StartupBus Africa road trip has completed a 2,500km tour from Harare, Zimbabwe to Cape Town, South Africa and spawned a potential Africa-focused education business.The StartupBus initiative was first launched in 2010 with a US tour and a European edition.And the African leg of the tour, which took place between 17 and 21 November, has been aimed at supporting entrepreneurs in Africa and helping international technology business people understand the African market.Christopher Pruijsen -- who is the co-founder of StartupBus Africa and Founder Bus UK -- told ITWeb Africa that StartupBus Africa is a competitive hackathon where 30 entrepreneurs gathered in Harare to leave on the trip to Cape Town.The five day road trip saw 15 entrepreneurs from Africa and 15 from the rest of the world come together to conceive, build, and launch their startups, Pruijsen explained.The participants included coders, designers and business developers focused on developing applications for the African market in areas such as mobile, healthcare and energy.
And on StartupBus Africa, London-based Pruijsen, Danielle Reid who is a designer from Germany and Dean Rotherham from Cape Town developed a startup business dubbed Sterio.Me.According to the Sterio.Me website, the project is one that engages young African learners through a simple teacher generated phone-call to reinforce learning outside the classroom.Sterio.Me is planned to see primary school teachers in Zimbabwe pre-record lessons and provide learners with a unique short message service (SMS) code that routes them to a homework exercise quiz.When a learner texts a code to the SMS service, an automated and a free and interactive Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) call from servers to the learner is expected to be triggered.Pruijsen has even told ITWeb Africa that he plans to move to Zimbabwe to be at the forefront of setting up the project in that country.The Sterio.Me, which will first be in a pilot stage, is planned to be launched in the next school year (January 2014) in some rural schools in Zimbabwe.Pruijsen said the project would help teachers reinforce learning outside the classroom via voice only calls on any basic feature phone.“Right now it’s for the primary school education system, and it’s not a tool to deliver new educational content. We’re not trying to replace teachers, we reinforce learning” he said.“We enable teachers to give for example homework assignments in a much easier way,” he added.Pruijsen explained that the audio homework assignments are pre-recorded by a teacher.
The homework would be in the form of a few questions ten minutes in length, which is about five questions some of them will be multiple choice questions, others will be open ended questions.As an example, a question could be “What do you call when people move from the rural areas to the city area”? The learners would then get five options to choose from.Teachers are then also planned to be able to set up the homework assignments in their local languages, he said.Sterio.Me will be working with the Higher Life Foundation in Zimbabwe in order to gain access the schools in rural parts of the country.This is a free platform for both teachers and learners, Pruijsen said.
