Dr Sam Education Centre was Formed to give support to the village children and parents to improve their lives through education. The directors view is that only “Educated are free” will always be correct. Those who cannot use computers and access the internet will be as handicapped as those who cannot read and write now and in the past. This Statement is based on quote given in Manchester by Dr Stephen Pathmarajah in 1989 for the Institute of Energy the quote was “Those who cannot use the internet and have an email account will be as handicapped as those who cannot read and write now. ”

This does not mean people who cannot use access to the internet will not be able to survive, even now there are people who cannot read and write who are doing well, but they are handicapped in many ways. For this reason, she included Information Technology, English, Science and maths as the core subjects. Later, due to popular demand Tamil, Geography and History were included. Now we are offering six subjects and in the very near future, we may include others

We started the Centre with 8 desktop PCs with suitable monitors and provided IT training for all grades. Since the government schools did not have any formal IT lessons up to grade 10, there was no formal programme to follow. At the start of the year 2017 It was decided to compile our own IT syllabus backed up with lesson plans and teachers records to provide formal lessons. This revealed that the children’s standard of IT, required a lot more work. This was highlighted in the internal term marks. There are plans in place to give special training to encourage children to learn to use computers and to improve their IT skills.

Finding suitable English teachers is providing to be difficult for many reasons. Mainly, the quality of the teachers is inadequate to say the least. Even the materials, meaning the books available in the bookshops are full of mistakes and are not suitable.

To improve the teaching, books from England and Singapore were brought in and a library was set up to give the teacher’s good material to use in their teaching. It has to be said that children who are 14 years of age and above, seemed to have missed out on their basic English Education. We are attempting to address this issue by providing them with extra classes.

It’s noted that there are a number of children who have mastered English and can write good stories with some help on imagination. A sample of the stories they have written is given in this report in the students’ contribution

The science book published by Sri Lankan Government are excellent and give good experiments and activities for the children to do. Although most, if not all the schools have reasonable laboratory facilities they do not seem to have the time or staff availability to do experiments and demonstrate the practical side of the science syllabus. To give additional help and head start to the children a laboratory has been set up and the key apparatus purchased. The children are now given regular practical exercises and encouraged to get involved in practical experiments and so understand the joy of science. Experience of the children using the laboratory and doing practical work is given in the students’ section.

The existence of the laboratory and the practical work done at Dr Sam Education Centre spread locally and other children from Kilinochchi have requested permission to come and use the facilities. Their experience and contributions are also included in the student’s section.

We are pleased to report that a science graduate from the UK came and spent some time helping with some laboratory work and a medical doctor who graduated in Sri Lanka now working in the UK will come and do some demonstrations for all grades specifically in the school book for biology last November

Maths is always seen as the hardest and most boring subject. Even for maths, lab work has been developed to demonstrate different aspects of maths. The best comments we received to date are those made by the grade 10 girls, “We did not learning maths can be fun and full of jokes”. We are trying to relate both maths and science subjects to their daily life.

For maths we had to separate the children who were scoring low marks, to give special and different types of training. The result is obvious and very pleasing. One girl who score 23 in her first term marks scored 59 in her second term. When we asked her what happened she replied, “Now you give us special teaching, we understand and can do the sums”.

Some children have volunteered to write about their maths learning experience which is included in this report under the student’s section.

Most children do well in Tamil, not only because it is their mother tongue, but it has to be said it is the quality of teaching. We are fortunate to have very talented Tamil teachers. It is mouth-watering to watch them teach. The local school’s and our center’s scores in Tamil have always been very good.

Similar to English, we have purchased some good books and some advanced Tamil language skills. The children’s contribution are given at the end of this book where we hope we will show their writing skills.