Two weeks have just passed in a flash even though it seems that weather of this beautiful city has been hostile to me as I am coughing & sneezing almost every day. But the spirits are not dampened as my team is working with these amazingly passionate people from this organization called Junior Achievement Argentina.
Junior Achievement Argentina (JA Argentina) is an international organization whose aim is to inspire and prepare young people between the ages of 5 and 25 for the working world. This objective is achieved through the implementation of educational programs within three strategic areas: entrepreneurship, financial education and vocational skills. Junior Achievement’s Argentinian branch was founded in 1991 by Eduardo Marty, who first encountered the organization while studying in the US.
JA Argentina runs several programs in different schools which are aimed at teaching students the value of education, decision making, personal & professional development, understanding their strengths, interests, personal cost of dropping out of school, entrepreneurship, managing finances etc .
As we started interacting with Matias, Felicitas & other staff of JA Argentina to understand how they work, I realized how this organization is being run by the raw passion of these people. With just a staff of 12, they are doing exceptional stuff. Just in the last year they delivered their programs to 35000 students & aim to reach 100,000 students per year by 2020. The main challenge they face today is to reinvent themselves in these times & make their programs up to date as per the needs of today, leveraging the need of technology wherever possible. To go deeper on understanding the problem, we took one program called “Advantages of staying in school” and analyzed it thoroughly. We went through the volunteer & student user manuals, talked to students, volunteers, teachers who have been associated with this program during last year. Each of these activities has been really inspiring & enriching to me.The ex students we talked to were very smart & provided great insights to how the programs were being viewed by them, what could have been better & what were the main highlights. Similarly volunteers gave us the different perspective of the program & also mentioned about many challenging situations they faced while executing programs in certain neighborhoods & some times they need to deviate from the manuals & execute course differently keeping in view the background & understanding of the students involved in the program as one shoe doesn't fit all.
Most interesting part was the valuable information from our end users, the students when we visited one of the schools as they told us what they liked about the program & how they would like to see it future. One of the students highlighted that having an exercise across two pages, where they have to turn pages a number of times back & forth is definitely not good & would be better if an exercise runs through left & right page of the open workbook. This definitely gave me a new perspective of usability issues faced by end users in the IT world as well.
One of the interesting thing I found was almost every student has a smartphone with him/her & would like to use it for games etc instead of having the traditional medium of education. Also it was heartening to know from the school that 90% of the students who have attended JA programs during the last four years have joined university , which itself talks about the impact JA is having.We will be continuing this week on it & will definitely have even more interesting stuff to share next week,
Junior Achievement Argentina (JA Argentina) is an international organization whose aim is to inspire and prepare young people between the ages of 5 and 25 for the working world. This objective is achieved through the implementation of educational programs within three strategic areas: entrepreneurship, financial education and vocational skills. Junior Achievement’s Argentinian branch was founded in 1991 by Eduardo Marty, who first encountered the organization while studying in the US.
As we started interacting with Matias, Felicitas & other staff of JA Argentina to understand how they work, I realized how this organization is being run by the raw passion of these people. With just a staff of 12, they are doing exceptional stuff. Just in the last year they delivered their programs to 35000 students & aim to reach 100,000 students per year by 2020. The main challenge they face today is to reinvent themselves in these times & make their programs up to date as per the needs of today, leveraging the need of technology wherever possible. To go deeper on understanding the problem, we took one program called “Advantages of staying in school” and analyzed it thoroughly. We went through the volunteer & student user manuals, talked to students, volunteers, teachers who have been associated with this program during last year. Each of these activities has been really inspiring & enriching to me.The ex students we talked to were very smart & provided great insights to how the programs were being viewed by them, what could have been better & what were the main highlights. Similarly volunteers gave us the different perspective of the program & also mentioned about many challenging situations they faced while executing programs in certain neighborhoods & some times they need to deviate from the manuals & execute course differently keeping in view the background & understanding of the students involved in the program as one shoe doesn't fit all.
One of the interesting thing I found was almost every student has a smartphone with him/her & would like to use it for games etc instead of having the traditional medium of education. Also it was heartening to know from the school that 90% of the students who have attended JA programs during the last four years have joined university , which itself talks about the impact JA is having.We will be continuing this week on it & will definitely have even more interesting stuff to share next week,
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