In Cameroon, no exam is more important than the baccalauréat, which serves as the gateway to professional and higher-education aspirations. We build on existing literature on practice tests to evaluate how SMS-based quizzes could help students prepare for the baccalauréat. We find that students used our practice tests for formative assessment, as a prompt for recall and review of study material, and as a focus of collaborative study sessions.
We created a system to send regularly-spaced, multiple-choice questions to students' own mobile devices to help secondary school students in Cameroon with exam practice via either SMS or WhatsApp. Students' participation rates were heavily impacted by trust in the intervening organization and perceptions of personal security in the socio-technical environment. WhatsApp-based users had significantly lower participation as compared to SMS.
We present an SMS-based system for providing transit information based solely on existing cellular and GPS networks. We developed and applied our system to privately-run marshrutka buses in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. However, our goal is to more broadly address issues of ad-hoc shared transportation systems in the developing world. A custom designed GPS-GSM unit is placed on a vehicle, and users can query our server over SMS with their own non-GPS-enabled cell phones. We report on the accuracy of our location naming approach and summarize interviews with bus drivers and bus riders relating their views of the system.
This work consists of two main components: (a) a longitudinal ethnographic study in Kyrgyzstan that demonstrates the importance of transportation resources in the developing world and how to plan for an appropriate ICT solution, and (b) the results of a proof-of-concept system engineered to create a bottom-up, transportation information infrastructure using only GPS and SMS. Transportation is a very important shared resource; enabling efficient and effective use of such resources aids overall development goals.
Short message service (SMS) is cell phone technology that is a simple and flexible transport mechanism for programmatic information exchange in developing regions for database-based applications. MySMS takes advantage of this medium by providing a framework using SMS as a transport layer to allow SQL queries, notifications, remote code execution and rapid application development.