Background
There has been an increasing need to create new pedagogical strategies that can improve the knowledge, skills, and competence of students and promote lifelong learning (Alismail & McGuire, 2015; Birtwistle & Wagenaar, 2020). This is especially true for Information and Communication Technology (ICT)-related programmes in developing countries because it is argued that Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) – ACM/IEEE-based curricula and the necessary competencies are too general to be applicable in those countries (Tedre et al., 2009). There are also a few infrastructures for student experimentation. In addition, universities in these countries face other challenges due to a lack of competent instructors and technical support staff. Furthermore, because most teaching and learning is teacher-centred, the aforementioned challenges do not motivate students to learn. Thus, a student-centred learning approach is one of the novel approaches to addressing some of the aforementioned challenges (Barakabitze et al., 2019).
Social innovation labs have emerged as a potential solution to supplement formal classroom learning, which is traditional didactic teaching. While social labs provide valuable experiential learning opportunities and encourage collaboration, innovation, and problem-solving skills, they typically focus on specific real-world challenges and have a limited duration of engagement. Formal ICT learning in developing countries has always been fraught with difficulties, most notably a lack of adequate resources to deal with the rapidly changing landscape of emerging or disruptive ICT, such as data science and artificial intelligence resources. To meet this need, the Morogoro Youth Empowerment through the Establishment of a Social Innovation Lab was established at Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA) in Tanzania. The laboratory sought to foster a student-centred learning environment using a systems thinking approach in the development of a problem-based learning (PBL) curriculum. To support convenient content delivery and facilitate innovative learning approaches, an e-learning platform was implemented for on-campus and remote students.
Therefore, this chapter reports on the findings of an inquiry challenge-based competition, known as hackathons, as an assessment method for students who participated in the YEESI Lab training. The participants were presented with real-life problems accompanied by open data. The selected real-world problems with open data were sourced from the Zindi Africa platform, offering students and data science or Artificial Intelligence (AI) enthusiasts the opportunity to engage in inquiry-based learning and challenge-based learning. By examining the findings of the inquiry challenge-based competition and highlighting the performance of young innovators from YEESI Lab, this research contributes to the ongoing efforts to enhance ICT education in Tanzania.