Re-imagining education for refugee children using emerging technologies | Matthew Baldwin | TEDxMIT

Uganda is home to 600'000 South Sudanese child refugees, 56% of which do not attend school due to insufficient English skills. Matthew co-founded an initiative to tackle this: taking advantage of world leading educational techniques to create a technology enhanced English learning program to help South Sudanese refugees re-enter the school system. In his talk, Matthew will discuss the approach he has taken, lessons he learnt on the ground in Uganda and why others should begin to re-imagine education to utilise modern technological advances. Matthew Baldwin is a senior (Class of 2021) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studying Physics and Mathematics, and is originally from the UK. Over the past three years, he has worked on development projects across the world. Whether in Beijing, developing urban relocation plans for communities in informal settlements, or in Kathmandu, designing bamboo greenhouses for smallholder farmers, he is fixated by solving complex problems in international development. In February 2020, he co-founded an initiative aiming to bring English language learning to South Sudanese refugee children in Uganda, which is now the focus of his work, with MIT D-Lab. Away from development, Matthew has worked at CERN performing particle detector simulations, and is currently working with the Engineering Quantum Systems Group, researching superconducting qubits. He is a teaching assistant for four quantum computing courses taught through MIT, and is training for a marathon in his spare time. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx