Researches show that those who find the answer themselves retain it better than those who are told the answer. What schools should do ideally is to give children the motivation to get involved, to create an environment where children, driven by their curiosity, solve interesting problems, instead of simply memorizing answers to the problems that have already been solved. This may seem unrealistic with regard to some traditional systems but......

When we talk about academic training, a fashionable expression is to say that the established education system is defective - the current system is not defective, it is built in a great way. It's just that we do not need it anymore, it's obsolete. Ok, I can not speak for everyone, but based on what I could see in West Africa and South Asia, here are some hypotheses to consider:...

In Africa, in general there are not enough teachers and not enough hours of classes a day to teach children everything they need to know. That's why we need children to stay interested and continue to learn voluntarily, even after leaving the classroom. There is a solution that costs virtually nothing: alternate reality games....

Let's admit that the education system in Africa is currently rather demotivational. From the beginning of the school year, and starting the first homework, the ambitious student sees himself with a perfect score of 20 out of 20, but from there, the only possible direction is the reduction of his points, depending on his mistakes. If he is really brilliant, he could stay close to the average of 20, otherwise in general his average score drops with each of his mistakes. There is a sort of feedback loop that encourages failure: when you have a bad grade, you feel less motivated to study, so you study less, so you have more bad grades, and so on. Basically, the more you fail, the more you fail. However, in games, we learn that progress encourages progress and that the desire to be effective is a much stronger motivator than the fear of failure....

This is just a warning with respect to the recent 'web municipal elections'(!) in Ivory Coast. Revisiting the facts It all started like a joke, there was even an agama reptile among the candidates (obviously a fictive character). The initial idea seems to be some elections parody, some way of showing that technology and its users were able to come up with peaceful, transparent elections. The project appears online a couple of months back, then follow some online promotion through Facebook and Twitter and a few weeks later, about 500 people take part to the said election. A few local and international blogs relay the story, it all suddenly gets serious, there's even an investiture ceremony(!), the Ivorian Web population(?) would purportedly be having a mayor... The parody assumes a new form, and with baby steps, some projects of taking over responsibilities and placing regulations are starting to raise......