Many students have dropped out of engineering and medicine courses at an early stage, for various reasons. Some do so because they find the courses complicated. For this reason, 25-year-old that Arsene Simbi, decided to devise means to make these subjects fun and easy, and also create employment opportunities from them. He founded the Kicukiro-based ‘WatchIT Group’ in 2019, an ed-tech (educational technology) company that produces ‘Menya Tool Kits’ (educational kits) designed for students and teachers in STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics). The aim for this was and still is to bring a revolutionary way to learn about such courses for university and secondary students. Through his mobile labs, students are able to translate science and technology into real life scenarios. Arsene Simbi, founder and CEO of WatchIT Group. This means students get more practical skills that are required to be competitive on the job market. Simbi is a computer systems architect. He developed the inspiration for his company when he visited India some years back—as he visited different cities, universities and other education institutions, he found a spirit of creativity among young people. He was fascinated by the infrastructure and facilities, but most importantly, the culture of doing practical things. He was inspired and by that time, he was just a starter in the tech industry. Simbi didn’t think about creating an educational kit directly, but initially started doing research and development in science and technology. He was later able to build many innovative technologies in Rwanda, like the first solar car and smart agriculture technologies, with a team that he was leading some years back. Having started his company, his main focus was on capacity building in emerging technologies and STEM and building smart city solutions, which he believed would create job opportunities and solve some community problems. Simbi’s objective is to ensure that theoretical studies are translated into relevant real-life, practical skills and prepare learners in the job market of the 21st Century. “We have trained more than 200 students and provided our kits to some universities so far in Rwanda! And also some beneficiaries in Ivory Coast are using the kits,” he says. Through his online learning platform, he and his staff teach courses in ICT, like internet of things, programming of hardware devices and web development. They also provide science and physics courses. All provided with their respective kits. According to the engineer, the kits are made in different categories to accommodate students of different age groups from O-level to university, and the training programme has three levels—basic, intermediate and advanced. He says, when a student reaches advanced level, they are capable of amazing things and some have started developing affordable smart agriculture devices for irrigation management. Simbi says when he looks back at how he started and sees where he is heading, he only has strong faith that he is moving in the right direction and the future is bright, albeit he still needs to support local solutions, embrace them and find a way to get to the international market. His programmes assist students in learning how to collect, store, and visualise data, build remotely controlled applications—and improve everyday life as they think and experiment with physics principles by bringing a hands-on approach to physics in the classroom. Students’ share their views Pacifique Nshimiyumukiza, a student of Institut de Formation Apostolique de Kimihurura (IFAK), was almost giving up on maths, even though he pursued maths, economics and computer science. When he joined the Menya IoT (Internet of Things) programme, he was amazed by the enlightenment he received that made him love mathematics and be more open-minded. “The reason why I hated maths before Menya IoT is because it was based on methods that only ended in class. Nowhere outside of school had I seen these methods applied. This discouraged me,” says Nshimiyumukiza. With Menya IoT, he is shown how to use mathematical methods in a practical way. He says that the programme is fun, easy to learn, open and guided, because students ask questions directly and get answers. Anaelle Umuhire, who is currently a student at Warsaw University of Technology in Poland, is a graduate scholar in the Menya programme. She majored in physics, chemistry, and mathematics in high school, which made entering the Menya programme difficult because she had no previous computer experience. This piqued her curiosity in studying and working with the technical support team. In all of the projects that she was given, she used the Menya IoT Kit, which she says was initially overwhelming due to the various components, but after using it and studying about each component, it proved to be one of the best instruments to work with. This is because it allowed her to test any idea she had, ranging from protection to agriculture and many others. At the end of her training, Umuhire was able to work on a parking system project that tracks all parking movement and payment as part of the programme. It was one of the most unforgettable experiences for her. All of the knowledge she gained through the Menya in a short period of time is now assisting her in her university courses. Vision Simbi visualises seeing many more Rwandan and African children have the opportunity to be engineers and scientists, attaining education that solves real challenges that communities are facing.
