The Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport (MoEYS) and Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) Cambodia held a ceremony to announce the use of new educational technology
for children aged 4 to 12 from Think!Think! and the computer brand KOOMPI yesterday.
Think!Think! is an application with bite-sized mini-games to assist children in the development of their intellectual skills and problem-solving abilities. It is Japan’s No 1 e-learning app and will be the first external application in the new KOOMPI model E11 designed with a learning suite for students, providing both subsidised and leasing options to open the initiative to students at a very affordable price.
The word KOOMPI is derived from the Khmer phrase meaning “The Books, or Source of Knowledge”.
It is a Cambodian-branded computer powered by Linux and open-source software to help build and provide tools for the next generation of problem solvers.
Chief Executive Officer of KOOMPI Thol Rithy said: “Everyone can afford to buy our PC at a very affordable price. The current price for pre-order is $148.99. The list price is $168.99. We plan to bring down the cost to $99 but that will take time. Our main initiative is ‘One-Student-One-Notebook’. We are even in the process of making laptop covers that can charge the PC through solar energy so that plugging a wire to a socket will not be mandatory to charge the battery.”
Chief Executive Officer of Think!Think! Daiki Watanabe said: “KOOMPI released the best hardware and we are the best software company from Japan. We will work together to provide the new product of KOOMPI OS utilising the Think!Think! app. Now everyone can access the best hardware and software to learn at an affordable price.”
After signing the official partnership of KOOMPI and Think!Think!, Watanabe said: “We are really happy to create equal opportunity for everyone to access learning with affordable prices, especially children in the provinces. Our target is age 4 to 12. However, children around age 4 may find it difficult to use the PC, so the tablet can be introduced for this age group, whereas the age group from 6 to 12 can use the PC.”
Rithy said, “This is another milestone achieved. This partnership has brought us together especially for educating children. We look forward for more collaborations together. Think!Think! is the first app officially pre-installed in KOOMPI and we hope that this is going to be the beginning for more apps to be developed and installed in the future.”
Naoko Ide, a representative of JICA, said of an initial experiment with a group of children: “Think!Think!’s project has a great impact on Cambodian society. JICA headquarters also pays immense attention to such projects. Through this project we are able to motivate students to study at home during this pandemic. We collaborated with MoEYS to offer Think!Think! online lessons and it was published on TVK2, MoEYS FB (Facebook) channels. This is one of our current achievements.”
The Director of the Department of Information Technology at MoEYS Sok Tha said: “With KOOMPI’s latest technology and Think!Think!’s best learning app under JICA’s support, we believe many more schools in both the public and private sectors will be able to create better education for students across Cambodia. This partnership can bring more benefit to education because it is very adaptive. ‘Game’ is a universal language for children and everyone will enjoy it while learning. Furthermore, this content can easily be part of the education process given that the schools need to have a computer
laboratory. Building the lab requires more investment which the partners have inititated to bring one school to one lab. The ministry will endorse this too.”
JICA and MoEYS will be the first customers to use KOOMPI OS utilising Think!Think! in a verification survey to see how successful it is. Think!Think! has been running a project with JICA and the MoEYS since 2018.
This article was first published in Khmer Times. All contents and images are copyright to their respective owners and sources.
