BRCK Education’s Kio Kit is designed and engineered in Africa for Africa. It is a hard, water-resistant, lockable case, with a single plug to charge the kit and one button to power the entire system. The Kit holds a BRCK – a rugged, cloud-managed, server/router, with its own battery and storage – and 40 Kio tablets. The rugged Kio tablets are also designed and engineered in Africa for Africa; to be more dust and water resistant than most, to reduce breakage, charge wirelessly in the Kit, and are locked to prevent theft and ensure digital child safety. The BRCK server and WiFi inside the Kio Kit stores and serves thousands of digital interactive, engaging and fun lessons curated from local and international content publishers to the Kio tablets which the students interact with. Teachers with little, or no, digital literacy find it easy and simple to start using the Kio Kit in their classrooms. After the first 6-8 lessons using the Kio Kit, teachers report being able to achieve the same lesson plan objectives for their students as they were before the technology intervention was introduced. Schools have also reported marked improvements in teaching approaches and students’ learning.

Environmental: The Kio Kit has been designed with battery capacity to power the Kit for an average class day (8 hours) and can be recharged via direct solar charging. When coupled with solar, the Kio Kit becomes a zero energy consumption digital classroom for 40 students.

Social: The potential for ICTs to help make schools more productive and efficient than they currently are, transform teaching and learning into an engaging and active process connected to real life, and prepare the current generation of young people for the future workplace may be a key determinate of the future success (or failure) of such initiatives.

Economic: As governments in developing countries struggle to build schools and train qualified teachers, millions and millions of children are denied a quality learning environment. Even where there is a school, often teacher salaries are low and budgets are never adequate. Digital classroom by day, the Kio Kit can be used as a tool for revenue generation to supplement school budgets via job skills training courses, cyber cafe, adult literacy courses, 40 seat tablet-based movie theatre, etc.