A Visit to Ntonso
Making Adinkra Ink
Adinkra
Ink can only be made from the Badee tree, a tree that will only grow in
Northern Africa. The bark of this tree is sent to Ntonso to be made into
Adinkra ink. On Tuesday, July 15th, I took a trip down there to
learn about the process of making the ink.
First
the bark must be stripped and soaked. The bark soaks in water kept outside in
the hot African sun until all the wood starts to fall apart. After hours of
soaking and sometimes days if it rains, the wood is pounded using human labor.
The person we spoke to there said that this strenuous pounding process, which I
had the opportunity to do myself, could never be done with a motor. He said with
complete confidence that it just cannot make the ink right. It has been tried
and it is always wrong; the curse of god demanding the hard work of man to get
good ink. After the ink is pounded and pounded it is boiled. The Bark is boiled
into ink using the arrangement of pots shown in the photo below. This
arrangement has been the same for over one hundred years.
<Badee
Ink Bark>
<Pounding the Bark>
<Boiling
Ink Bark>
Stamping Kente Cloth
Not
only do they make the ink at Ntonso but they also use it there to stamp
different Adinkra patterns onto Kente cloth. While there they let the RPI group
I am part of stamp our own strip of Kente cloth for memorabilia. I chose a
variation of Gye Nyame, the most famous Adinkra stamp in Ghana, and Adinkrahene
both of which are excellent representatives of ethnomathematics and ethnocomputing
because of log spirals and looping respectively. I also purchased and stamped
my own Kente cloth while there to take home with me, using four different
stamps each one to represent someone I love.
Traditional Symbols
Since
1993 the Adinkra carver/ stamper at Ntonso has been helping in the research of
ethnomathematics and log spirals so it has been decided that the reference
library of Adinkra symbols our project uses should be based off his stamps. So
during my visit, I got stamps of all the stamps that were made at the time to
use to revise the existing images in the reference library. There is so much
variation in Adinkra that this will be a solid foundation for why our symbols
look the way they do.
Introducing High School Students to Adinkra
Computing
Today,
my team returned to Kumasi High School to introduce Adinkra Computing to a
group of about twenty ICT students. The session began with a pre-test asking
three questions:
1.)
How
would you describe what flow of control is?
2.)
How
would you script the following image?
3.) What
does looping do to the flow of control?
We then
continued on to explain what ethnomathematics is and how our project suggests
an opportunity for ethnocomputing. In order to give focus and clarity to our
lesson in CSnap there was an important question to be answered. So…
What is Adinkra Computing?
Adinkra
Computing brings computer programming concepts together with Adinkra symbol
carving and design. The discipline of ethnocomputing is used across different
cultural contexts to reveal that present day computing concepts are embedded in
local designs and artifacts. These designs and artifacts often have cultural
and/or religious significance to groups of people in specific geographical
locations. Adinkra symbols, being indigenous to Ghana, are examples of where
computing and culture intersect. Since Adinkra symbols have concepts with
computational significance embedded in them, learning to program CSnap
introduces students to deep connections between computing and their
heritage/culture. Adinkra Computing helps students to learn computational
thinking by drawing on local Ghanaian design knowledge.
After
addressing our purpose and research at the high school we began teaching
through example how to use the program. The example we used for this is
Adinkrahene, using the same script we had given to the ICT teachers at the PD
workshop on Monday. This is a great example to use because Adinkrahene teaches
flow of control, looping, reinforces math and geometry principles, and involves
thinking about variables.
After
getting students introduced to CSnap and practicing the Adinkrahene example
with them we proposed a design challenge to them. The design challenge involved
the Adinkra symbol Aya (the fern).
In
this design challenge we provided on student’s computers the script to create,
, and
challenged them to use the looping method we introduced in the Adinkrahene
example to create the script that would add the remaining ferns.
Students
were given about forty minutes to work on the design challenge. ICT teachers
who had attended Monday’s PD workshop circulated while the students worked, or
hopefully played, with CSnap and helped to guide them in the right direction;
my team and I also circulated and offered are assistance. During the lesson I
gave two hints to the students:
1.)
In
the loop we need to figure out what is the same? This is the log spiral block
that draws what the leaf will look like.
2.)
In
the loop we need to figure out what is changing? This is the y position of
where we draw the leaves.
In the
forty minutes there was a steep hill to climb with some students, which is
deeply connected to the ICT curriculum in Ghana, however a strong commitment to
complete the challenge. For those students who completed the challenge early
some helped their classmates, some students played with different blocks and
variables to get a feel for what blacks do what, one student deleted the script
including what we had given and what he had written in order to try and rewrite
the entire script himself, and one very bright student used the program to
create his own animation.
At the
end of the lesson and design challenge the students were given the same three
questions they were given earlier as a post test. Comparing the pre and
post-test is a way of measuring the success of Adinkra Computing as a tool for
teaching computer programming and helps is to both improve the CSnap software
and also the way we go about teaching it. Overall the lesson was a huge success
and we have been invited back to the school on Saturday to work with the ICT
club!