XMWZ has mastered English and Afrikaans – now for isiZulu. . .
AS WE MOVE into the second half of the second month of the year, the wheels at MyExamSlayer are beginning to gain traction.
Our newest employee XMWZ (say Exam Whizz) has completed his English and Afrikaans lessons – his Afrikaans pronunciation is not yet perfect, admittedly – and before the end of the month he will start learning isiZulu.
He has so far recorded 28 short videos as part of the MyExamSlayer course, and there is a similar number still to come.
Why did we go to all the work – and expense – of importing a robot from the planet Setarcos to host the courses’ many videos? The answer is something we touched on in an earlier blog, and something about which we feel very strongly.
And that is – as Prof Daphné Bardier, a Geneva-based pedagogical expert, put it – that fun is a vital, fundamental building block in the construction of an effective teaching regime. If your learners are not having fun, they are not learning efficiently.
Have a look at the picture on this page of an American visitor at one of the schools she visited on a recent fact-finding mission. Look at the faces of the kids in the picture – a small percentage of the 100+ Grade R learners who share a classroom – and decide if you think they are having fun.
Now look at this picture of a child only a few years older than the Grade R kids in the first picture. Quite a difference, isn’t it?
South Africa’s education system not only produces badly educated school leavers, it makes their time in school so devoid of fun that when exam time rolls around it is no surprise that most exam-writers are apprehensive and poorly-prepared.
MyExamSlayer has been from the very start planned as an aid to help children perform better in exams. What we realized a little later was that if it was to succeed it needed to be fun for the kids to use.
And that’s why we went to the trouble of employing XMWZ.