Namibia becomes the 10th country to run CensusAtSchool

At the beginning of October Kate Richards and Neville Davies spent a busy four days in Windhoek, Namibia, explaining a strategy for planning, writing and running the CensusAtSchool project in Namibian schools. The visit was hosted by Medmillian Handura, founder of Oupatje, a not-for-profit organisation that will run CensusAtSchool Namibia. Kate and Neville ran a workshop for 16 school teachers, appeared on Namibian television, met the director general of education and a senior Namibian economist and visited Acedemia Secondary School.

At the workshop the teachers were introduced to the following topics, essential for participating in the project:

• the International CensusAtSchool Project;
• motivating learners with collecting meaningful data;
• recording and uploading data to web forms;
• getting learners to learn from data;
• downloading samples of data for classroom learning;
• creating a CensusAtSchool Namibia questionnaire.

Written feedback from the participants included:

• well structured and user friendly;
• powerful tool for encouraging the learning of statistics;
• very relevant, interesting and informative;
• a well educating workshop! Thank you!;
• I am keen to get involved! Very excited indeed.

In the next 3 or 4 months a pilot project will be run in 10-15 schools and champions for the project established. There will be a range of workshops offered for teachers to find out about CensusAtSchool and the benefits it can bring for improving the statistical literacy of learners and teachers.

It is likely that a design and delivery committee will be set up to oversee the pilot and it will involve teachers and learners in the design and content of the questionnaire that will be administered to Namibian schools, first in the pilot and subsequently in the full roll-out later next year.

The RSSCSE looks forward to helping to run the pilot and the subsequent full roll-out of the project. The other countries that are running CensusAtSchool are: the UK; South Africa; Australia; New Zealand; Canada; Ireland; Japan; United States; South Korea.