Entry by David Noyes

Greetings! My name is David Noyes and I am just starting here at the World Cocoa Foundation as the new Education Intern, working with Charlie Feezel on the ECHOES program. I recently returned to the US after working for two years in Burkina Faso as a secondary education Peace Corps volunteer. In Burkina, I taught math, physics, and chemistry at one of the largest public high schools in the country. While there I did a lot of work on introducing technology-based teaching methods at my school. We did this through the construction of an Internet café at the school, the installation of a video projector in a teaching laboratory, and teacher training on how to find resources online and how to use the relevant software to incorporate these resources into lessons in the classroom. This allowed teachers to show things such as animations of blood flow through the heart and simulations of physics and chemistry experiments when previously their only teaching resources were chalk and a chalkboard.

Working at the World Cocoa Foundation with the ECHOES program is a very exciting opportunity as it gives me the chance to work on a project that seeks to improve the quality and relevance of education in rural West Africa. As a teacher in West Africa, I often saw my students struggle with lessons that seemed far removed from anything they encountered in their day-to-day lives. Students were often left with the impression that math and science was something you learned about at school, but that had little relevance outside the classroom. The ECHOES program addresses these kinds of issues by helping to make education more relevant and applicable to the lives of youth in their communities.

I am already very impressed by the great work that World Cocoa Foundation and its partners are doing, which I got a great introduction to while helping out at the recent partnership meeting. I look forward to making my own contribution while working on ECHOES!