The games tent

This was one of the most fun places to be during the Open Week. There were board games, puzzle games, a chess tournament, scrabble, and numerous computer games for learning and competition. The diversity of people that showed up here was fabulous.

Photo: Tesfahun showing the students how to use the games.

Photo: First contestant

Photo: Focused learning

The students had an amazingly great time in the games tent. There were students from all grades and many schools. It was great to watch the learning curve of the young ones, especially the ones that had never used a computer mouse before. Watching the dexterity rapidly develop - awesome.

In the other tents there were many other presentations, but the photo below is one of my favorites because it shows that the 1970's is making a come back here in Ethiopia and we can only hope that it will spread to Canada. The KOICA volunteer is here to teach art for 2 years and she is amazing.

Photo: 70's come back 

 It was great to see these students all working together to play the game rather than competing individually. They would all call out answers and the person at the keyboard would type in the responses. Every single student was focused on a common goal.

However, as a result of the continuous power fluctuations here in Ethiopia, the television eventually got zapped and we had to switch to using my laptop for the last group. The smaller screen size didn't detract from the entertainment though - as the photo below illustrates.

Photo: Great group of kids showing off their crazy face poses.

 Chess Competition

Henok (left side of picture below), a third year College of Teacher Education student is also on the Ethiopian National Chess Team and will hopefully be competing in the world championships in Norway this summer. The winner of the CTE tournament faced off against Henok in the grande finale. Henok won the game, but it was a hard fought battle to the end.

Photo: Henok - left vs winner of the college tournament - right

Photo: The second and third place finishers of the college tournament doing battle.

The students in the video below were fantastic to work with in the games tent and when they broke into song, I was very glad that I had my camera ready to record it.