Land of destiny

Land of destiny

A dream to turn an isolated province into an IT centre is coming closer to reality as teachers and students are trained to be programmers.

Published on October 15, 2007

It takes Wisutthichat Boonkham, a computer teacher from Pai Wittayakom School, around three hours to travel the thousands of curves along the road from Mae Hong Son to Chiang Mai, but the arduous journey never discourages the 27-year-old teacher.

Every two weeks, he and another 29 volunteer teachers from many districts in the province have to pack their belongings, catch a bus to the central city of the North and spend one and a half days on their weekends to learn something that, in the future, will turn the isolated land into an IT valley.

A group of computer experts has been arranged to train this group of teachers to improve their computer skills. A basic C programming language is taught in the six-month period to allow the ordinary computer teachers to write their own software programs and to teach schoolchildren to become software developers.

Training teachers under this programme gives Wisutthichai and other teachers in Mae Hong Son more computer knowledge. They said they now had more confidence to become computer trainers even though at first it was really hard for them.

"It's like we're crossing a high mountain," Wisutthichai said, "but after we try to get over it, we find it wasn't that hard."

Wisutthichai has been learning C programming language for five months and he will finish the first basic course this month. Every week, after he finishes training, he takes his knowledge back to his 150 students at Mattayom 4 level.

The training programme is a part of the National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre (Nectec)'s plan to develop the deep valley land to be an IT centre in the next ten years. To start the mission, training local people is the first task.

The centre started the project to teach C programming to the first group of computer teachers in May and the course is to finish this month.

Kwan Sitathani, Nectec's deputy director and also director of the IT Valley project, said the idea was to educate trainers in the provinces so they could instruct their students in IT literacy and eventually develop people in this isolated area to write software programs for local use.

Writing programs is not easy for school students in this province and Wisutthichat admitted that the first time he taught computer programming to his students it was very difficult to attract them to the concept of writing programs.

"Many children are not interested in what they've never known before. I have to encourage and make them realise the benefits they will get from learning programming language. One student asked me why he had to learn C language because his family's occupation is farming. I answered that the course will help him improve his thinking processes, but you know how he responded? He said that farming did not need any thinking processes," Wisutthichat said with a laugh.

While this may be an amusing story for most of us it indicates the challenge faced by a teacher such as Wisutthichat to persuade his students to learn programming language. The teacher tries hard to make them understand the chances they could get in the future if they improve their skills in software development and he encourages his students to keep an open mind to accept new things.

His efforts have found some success. After several months of teaching, his students have improved and now they can write 20 lines of code within eight minutes. "It makes me proud to see their improvement. I hope that within a year they will be able to write at least a simple program to control a computer," he said.

That's also a hope of a schoolboy from Rajaprajanugroh 22 School in Pai district, who hopes that one day he can develop software to control a robot to do tasks for humans.

Chartchai Laomee, the 18-year-old student, is among Mattayom 4 students in this isolated district who had the chance to learn coding. In his computer class, the young boy pays great attention to learning program writing, something he's never done before.

"It's quite hard for me," the boy admitted, "but after learning, I feel it's really fun, especially when I realised that I could make a computer do as I command from my coding."

Even though born with a handicap, Chartchai has not made his disability an obstacle to learning. He started to use the computer when he was in Pratom 6. He can type each character on the keyboard and use a mouse rapidly though he has only two short fingers.

As well as using the computer to search for information from the Internet, the boy now uses the machine to write his own programs. When he gets an assignment from the teacher, he tries to think of his own way to write each line of code to make the computer calculate, for example, grade point averages.

Learning programming language is just a starting point for people in Mae Hong Son but with more training, it's not too far fetched dream that IT skills in the province will improve.

The IT Valley project's coordinator Surapont Toomnark, an assistant professor from King Mongkut University of Technology Thonburi, said after the first course on basic C programming there would be more courses on advanced programming or open source arranged for the Mae Hong Son teachers.

"We want to develop teachers here to have enough knowledge to train their students so the province can become an IT valley," he said.

Nectec hopes the training programme will be a foundation for the province to create its own technology. Under the plan, Nectec will develop the isolated land to become technology self-reliant. Instead of buying technology from outside, people will be able to create their own technology to serve local needs and if their skills improve, they could also receive software outsourcing jobs from outside.

However, to move Mae Hong Son towards an IT valley, Nectec's director Pansak Siriruchatapong added that better basic telecommunications infrastructure was required. As high mountains surrounded the area, wireless communication should be implemented.

The centre is now talking with the Japan International Cooperation Agency for collaboration on WiMax broadband infrastructure in schools around the province so that teachers and children will be able to use the network to exchange information.

"We're now studying a model for the project. We hope the network will improve teaching and learning of people in Mae Hong Son," Pansak said.

Nectec brought IT and the Internet to Mae Hong Son ten years ago and since then there have been many changes in the region.

From knowing nothing about IT, Pansak said people had better IT literacy while they now utilise technology to improve their lives.

Pongpen Sutharoj

The Nation

Mae Hong Son