A Visit to Ntonso and Introducing High School Students to Adinkra Computing

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 15^th, 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!