The IDEMS Podcast

Lucie and David discuss a $7,000 grant from Float, funding internships to support tech projects in West Africa and Kenya. The initiative will advance community tech in agroecology and prepare for a larger $45,000 workshop, emphasizing IDEMS' focus on capacity building and collaboration.

In this podcast episode, Santiago and David discuss IDEMS’ strategy for sustainable growth through Social Enterprise Impact Bonds. They revisit the concept of 'fundamentally profitable', emphasizing the need for financial sustainability to support impactful projects. The conversation highlights their unique funding model, offering ethical and secure returns for investors, aimed at fostering social impact while avoiding high-risk ventures.

Lucie and David discuss their recent workshops in Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali, focusing on teaching effective research visualizations to diverse stakeholders within the Global Collaboration for Resilient Food Systems. They highlight the importance of visual storytelling, the challenges faced, and the inspiring engagement of local teams.

How can we transform complex data into understandable information? In this episode, Lily and David discuss the concept of factors in data analysis. They consider the historical context of factors, their importance in grouping data, and how they revolutionise statistical thinking.

How can we incentivise student learning? Santiago and David discuss various educational technologies and innovations, focusing particularly on SmileyCoin and the SmileyTutor system from Iceland. David shares insights from his collaboration with Gunnar Stefánsson, who developed a unique system that uses multiple choice questions to enhance student learning, and integrates a cryptocurrency designed to incentivise learning by rewarding students financially.

Santiago and David provide an in-depth look at PreTeXt, an open-source authoring tool designed to separate the roles of authors and publishers. David recounts his early interactions with PreTeXt founder Rob Beezer and discusses the evolution and principles behind the tool. They highlight the importance of modularity, separating content from presentation, and emphasize the tool's relevance for creating interactive, adaptable educational resources. The discussion also touches on PreTeXt's integration with other tools like STACK and the broader vision of combining multiple open-source technologies to address diverse educational needs.

Santiago and David discuss the innovative “five quiz” model – an educational framework designed to improve student learning outcomes. Conceived during the pandemic, this model includes five types of quizzes: prerequisites, instructional, mastery, testing, and extension quizzes. Santiago and David explore how this framework, originally conceptualised for online courses, addresses various educational contexts and learning needs, from low-resource environments to high-resource institutions like Caltech.

Lily and David Stern discuss the history and impact of Computer Assisted Statistics Textbooks (CAST), developed by New Zealand lecturer Doug Sterling. The discussion highlights the interactive and assessment-driven nature of CAST, recounting how its use in Kenyan classrooms led to significant improvements in student performance. They reflect on the technological challenges that led to CAST's decline and extract key lessons for designing sustainable educational resources.

What happens if statistics teaching starts from data rather than methods? In this episode, Lily and David explore the idea that statistics education should prioritise data analysis over traditional methods-first approaches, discussing the benefits and challenges of this paradigm shift. Highlighting examples from New Zealand's education system and their own experiences, they argue that a data-first approach can provide more practical and widely applicable skills for students, despite the structural challenges it may pose.

For those unfamiliar with STACK, consider searching the podcast backlog for previous episodes on the subject. In this episode, Santiago and David discuss the latest developments with STACK in Africa. They highlight various recent developments, including: tailored data course trainings in Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali; the inaugural African official STACK conference set for 2026 in Kenya; the establishment of an African STACK Center at Masinde Muliro University; impressive outcomes from the use of STACK in Kenyan schools and technical colleges; the new PreTeXt textbook initiative for Ethiopian universities, impacting over 4,000 students; and additional efforts in Namibia, Tanzania, Somalia, and South Sudan.