BrainShare App Offering A One-Stop-Shop For Ugandan Students Revision
In the words of Nelson Mandela, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world”. True to these words, education is a fundamental key in bringing about social progress and reforms. It has the power to formulate a society’s purpose, in a skillful manner that coordinates its means and resources to achieve a positive growth and the direction of growth be in sync with the society’s wishes of where it wants to move. Education can be defined best as an intimate union of art and science that has ever been conceived by the human mind.
Sadly though, in Africa and most developing nations around the world, quality education continues to be a privilege for the rich. The children of the rich get quality education and are better trained for the workforce hence considered first and most during employment. While the less privileged kids get substandard education and when it comes to employment, it becomes a big milestone competing with their counterparts who had quality education. Thus effectively the vicious cycle of poverty would plague the poor for generation to come.
This inequity is perhaps what prompted young Ugandan innovator, Charles Muhindo to launch the BrainShare app in Uganda. With this app, Muhindo says, “BrainShare was created to try and level the education playing field, by linking students from less privileged schools to reading and revision materials and teachers from schools that do well academically”. Basically what BrainShare app does, is that it avails to all, quality education resources that are available in schools for privileged kids, and shares them in an app platform with kids whose schools can’t afford such quality education materials.
This automatically solves the socio-economic imbalance in the society and kids in less privileged schools get the same quality reading and revision materials as kids from privileged background. Hence when sitting for the national examinations, the playing field is even since all students had a fair chance at equipping themselves well using the best reading and revision materials available countrywide. The launch of BrainShare app was made possible after Muhindo pitched his idea at the DEMO Africa 2013, where he was among the lucky Top 40 nominated to launch their ideas during the DEMO Africa conference that was held in Kenya on October last year. The following is a video of Charles Muhindo, CEO of Founder of BrainShare App pitching his idea for the DEMO Africa.
BrainShare app presents an alternative education platform that is not only affordable but also allows students to test themselves, compare with their counterparts, share reading materials via hashtags and interact with others via SMS and USSD. Orange Uganda telecom company has partnered up with BrainShare app to enable users receive USSD services by dialing *100*7*1#. You can download the app to your Android device by following this link.
The BrainShare website has different sections for student in different levels of learning starting with Primary, O-level, A-level, University and Skills Section. It also has a Teachers Section for teachers to log in and give their contribution to the online learning platform, as well as enhance their teaching skills by learning from their peers in other schools.
