Helping close the digital divide in Palestinian refugee camps

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  Jalazone Computer Clubhouse

  Cultivating a new attitude for learning
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  Jalazone Computer Clubhouse

  Club members practicing computational thinking
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  Jalazone Computer Clubhouse

  Establishing a lasting attraction to technology through games design
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  Jalazone Computer Clubhouse

  The Jalazone computer clubhouse program emphasizes creativity with information technology
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  Jalazone Computer Clubhouse

  Somaia Salah [a volunteer tutor] is demonstrating Scratch to her fellow volunteers
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  Jalazone Computer Clubhouse

  Prof. Volker Wulf is heading the orientation session with the volunteers
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  Jalazone Computer Clubhouse

  Building and mobilizing a strong Jalazone-University network of volunteers
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  Jalazone Computer Clubhouse

  Engaging female children in information technology and math
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  Jalazone Computer Clubhouse

  Cultivating a new attitude for learning
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  Jalazone Computer Clubhouse
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  Jalazone Computer Clubhouse
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  Jalazone Computer Clubhouse
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  Jalazone Computer Clubhouse
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  Jalazone Computer Clubhouse
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  Jalazone Computer Clubhouse

Fighting to close the digital divide - in Palestinian refugee camps

 
BZU CONNECT is a premium community outreach program that aims to empower children and youth living in Palestinian refugee camps.  By establishing a network of Computer Clubhouses in the heart of the West Bank's refugee camps, this initiative aims to create engaging community-based learning environments through which youngsters [living in Palestinian refugee camps] can interact with university mentors to develop competencies and essential life skills primarily through the use of ICT.

Birzeit Univeristy selected Al-Jalazone refugee camp to house the first computer clubhouse of the project.  At Al-Jalazone refugee camp - which is situated at 7 km north of the city of Ramallah and suffers from overcrowding due to its high population density - the computer clubhouse program emphasizes creativity with information technology and provides fulfilling learning experiences to the youngsters living there.  Passionate University student volunteers [tutors] are the driving force of the computer clubhouse program and the face-to-face mentoring that they offer is a critical factor that sustains its success.  The result, is a new form of an engaging learning community - in which in-camp youngsters and university student mentors work together on projects and ideas to create their own digital artwork, animations, computer games, interactive story-telling, websites, and robotic prototypes.

JALAZONE COMPUTER CLUBHOUSE CHILDREN MEMBERS

Cultivating a new attitude for learning

"We are leveraging the power of information technology tools to transform the Jalazone clubhouse members into creative learners," says George Yerousis - an engineer at Birzeit University who is helping build and mobilize the camp-university network component of the computer clubhouse - "... by constantly keeping the clubhouse members actively engaged in designing and inventing new things based on their own interests and talents and with the help of their 16 committed university student mentors who are listed here."

The learning model in the Jalazone computer clubhouse is based on the latest educational research that shows that youngsters learn most effectively when they are actively engaged in designing and developing projects rather than memorizing facts and figures or learning random skills.

Participants practice computational thinking

With the direct supervision of Birzeit University and the University of Siegen, the computer clubhouse at Jalzone is open daily for the camp community and is regularily visited by at least 40 male and female in-camp children.  Google's App Inventor and MIT's Scratch are just 2 of the software that in-camp participants use in order to have fun with information technology.

Google App Inventor

App Inventor lets you design and build applications for Android phones using a web browser and a connected phone.

Scratch

Scratch is a programming language that makes it easy to create interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art and share the creations on the web.

The computer clubhouse project [in Palestinian refugee camps] is implemented in cooperation with the Institute of Information Systems at the University of Siegen and is funded by the German Federal Foreign Office.

 Read the media coverage [Arabic]
 Read about the project on Birzeit University's website [Arabic]
Read about the project on the University of Siegen website [English]
Download the press release [Arabic]

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Project Partners