The awarenet open lab is an open computer lab available to everyone in the Joza and neighboring communities in Makhanda, it is mainly used by school children of the surrounding primary and secondary schools. We also have a number of adults who come to use our open lab in the morning. They mainly use it for typing of C.Vs and for online job applications, checking news and emails.
The awarenet open lab is always full with school learners in the afternoon, the children of the different schools want to use the computers for homework and research purposes, particularly the high school learners are keen on using the lab for educational purposes . Sometimes it’s frustrating to control such a number of learners especially when they all want to do homework and we have a limited number of computers. But we always have supervisors who are there to control them and give everyone a chance to use the computers.
Some learners not only use the computer lab for school-related work but also for social media, as some of them don’t have phones at home. We also offer offline games which are popular among primary school learners. Some of these games are of an educational character and help in developing skills in Maths and English.
We always register our computer lab users whenever they use the computers in the lab. We had 1473 unique users since the beginning of November 2019 – What a huge number!
Our Open Lab is always open from Monday to Thursday from 1 till 5 and on Friday we open from 1 till 4.