Digital Skills for Disadvantaged Children in China

2022 continues to be dominated by the epidemic in China, with regular school closures and event cancellations. In spite of these challenges, our team has carried on with providing online and offline digital literacy classes to disadvantaged students in China, even providing more lessons than anticipated during the spring and summer terms.

Thanks to our partners and about 180 volunteers, more than 800 students have benefitted from our digital literacy program in 2022 so far. From January to September 2022, our volunteers and trainers have delivered an impressive total of 776 lessons to our students. As the Fall 2022 semester is well under way, we are very pleased to have resumed our programs at many of our partner schools and community centers in China. We are currently delivering lessons at 4 online and 10 offline teaching sites, as well as at dozens of students’ homes through the internet.

Along with providing digital literacy classes to children across China, we have continued to update and improve our lessons and teaching materials to ensure they stay practical and relevant to our students’ educational needs. New lessons in social-emotional learning, coding, graphical programming and embedded system design (Micro:bit) were added to our curriculum to enhance our students’ knowledge and learning experience during these difficult and exceptional times. For example, our new classes allow students not only to learn to programming hands-on, but also to understand how the sensors are programmed to detect and control light, acceleration, temperature, and humidity.

It goes without saying that none of this would be possible without the efforts and dedication of all of our volunteers, donors and other supporters. Thank you all for your support!

Links:

• Read more about our programs on our website

As was the case in 2020 and 2021, our flexibility and resilience were put to the test during the first six months of 2022. We are very proud to say that our team more than rose to the challenge. Despite facing lockdowns and school closure in Shanghai and many parts of China due to surging COVID-19 cases, we have carried on with our efforts to provide educational services to our beneficiaries by improving our online processes, transferring our offline programs to online mode, opening new online programs, and recruiting volunteers from different backgrounds.

In the first six months of 2022, more than 100 volunteers and trainers joined forces to deliver an impressive total of 552 digital literacy lessons (almost all of them online) to 427 disadvantaged students. New lessons in coding were also added to our curriculum to enhance our students’ knowledge and learning experience during these difficult and exceptional times.

As the summer has started, we are very excited to have resumed some of our offline programs in Shanghai, while continuing to provide engaging online lessons. We are currently delivering online or offline lessons to more than 200 students.

In addition to supporting us through funding or donation of equipment, many of our partners have also contributed to our program by encouraging their employees to volunteer with us. For example, PricewaterhouseCoopers have mobilized so far more than 50 employees to join our program in 2022. We are also especially grateful to the Transparent Fish Fund and the Chao Foundation for their continued support since 2016.

Thank you all for your support!

Links:

• Read more about our programs on our website