Monday, April 11, 2011

A determined student - John Brown


John Brown is the seventh born in a family of nine siblings and the fifth among boys.
His parents are farmers based in Western Kenya. At the tender age of 9 years in 2005, while in class 2, Brown was introduced to computers by his aunt. She taught him how to play games such as Bow Man and this sparked a sensation and enthusiasm like no other. With such a game, he was able to develop eye-hand co-ordination since the game involves pointing and clicking.

In 2009 at Thika Primary School for the Blind, Brown was excited when he knew he could continue learning about computers as inABLE started operating in the school from July 2009.As time progressed, so did his passion. With the introduction to Gmail, Brown was always keen to reply mails sent to him as much as possible. Whenever visitors came to the school he was quick to ask for their email addresses so that they can interact more frequently.

As the computer concepts seemed complex to some of his classmates, he viewed them as an extension of himself and this made it easy for him to understand. Always asking questions in class and willing to do research on the web on class work material, has moved Brown a notch higher than the rest. This is because he was the number One student end of year 2010 in the entire class 7 with 377 marks out of 500.

After learning some fundamental concepts in HTML, Brown approached me with a sketch of a web page that he would like to create. From the sketch, he intended to include a picture of himself and some personal details. I could see a clear sense of the end product as it displayed images and text at various portions. He tried as much as possible not to cluster the details on one page. He later put pen to paper and developed the sketch in HTML.


Currently, he is working on improving his HTML skills in order to develop products that will suite the market. He is one of the students who participated in designing their school website this month.

He is a self-driven, inquisitive, focused and persistent student aiming high for the skies. His dream is to become a pilot when he grows up.