Art and Creativity program
The Art and Creativity program is developed and implemented by our volunteer Dhanisha. The objectives of the program are to promote the students’ creativity, develop their sense of observation, and to allow them to properly express themselves using different medias. The program is currently run in Roches Bois on Saturdays.
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ELI Code
The ELI Code program is currently being developed and implemented in Roches Bois by Michael and Cedric, two software developers and technology enthusiasts. The objectives of the ELI code program are to promote problem solving skills and develop basic IT and programming skills among the students. Various components of the program have been inspired from worldwide initiatives to teach programming to young children such as Hour of Code.
The program is basically divided into two parts. The first part allows students to acquire basic programming skills and graphic design skills through simple activities and projects. The students will make use of Scratch, a visual programming language developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, and will also be introduced to some basic HTML. The second part of the program will be more specialised i.e. students will be divided into categories such as programming, graphic design or web design according to their preferences and competencies identified during the first part of the program.
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Positive Psychology
The Maytiv Positive Psychology program was established in 2010 at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC), Herzliya, Israel by Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar, an eminent Positive Psychology teacher, lecturer, and best-selling author. The program was kindly offered to ELI Africa by Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar for free.
Positive psychology focuses on how to enrich quality of life and optimize individual functioning, in order to create personal and social change. Whereas traditional psychology typically focuses on people’s social-emotional difficulties and seeks to alleviate their psychological symptoms and suffering, Positive Psychology goes beyond alleviation of symptoms by promoting self-realization, human happiness, fulfillment and a sense of meaning. We believe that this program greatly benefits students who come from families with poor socio-economic backgrounds. The Maytiv Positive Psychology program is currently run in both Roches Bois and Rivière du Rempart.
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Trash to Treasure
The Trash to Treasure recycling program is developed and implemented by two volunteers namely Kimtee and Karishma. The objectives of this program are not only to promote creativity but also to make the students environmentally conscious. Basically, the idea is to make the students create new products from used things, which would have eventually added up to our saturated dumping sites, thus encouraging them to recycle.
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CPE Preparation
The aim of this program is to tackle the heart of the CPE conundrum. The subjects taught include English, Science, History & Geography and Mathematics. A lot of effort is put in ensuring that students have a solid grounding in the English language since all the above cited subjects are taught in English.
A key aspect of the program is that classes have an important experiential component and make use of fun and interactive activities. For example, a topic could be chosen for each month. In a month focused on sports, the vocabulary will focus on sports, but there will also be occasional classes in which various sports are played to provide an experiential component. If vocabulary and syntax can be associated with actual experiences, the students will have far better retention of the material. Also, In a month focused on studio art, actual art projects will be completed centered on English skills. Collage from English papers, for example, could provide a means of connecting English skills and art.
The CPE preparation program has been run in 2013 in centers in Roches Bois and Pamplemousses with a success rate of 73%. The program has been run in 2014 in Roches Bois with a pass rate of 83%.
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