Staying at home might sound fun to you. Maybe just a bit boring if done over a long period of time.
But for Avan the teacher, this is a major challenge. How is he supposed to teach if he could not see his students?
If you were him, what would you do?
Published:
Copyright 2021. Kompas.com
The Covid-19 pandemic gave rise to complex issues in various aspects from medical to social. We have been seeing problems not only in the efforts to develop vaccines and detection tools to fight off the virus, but also mental health troubles and the digital divide limiting access to education.
Kompas.com believes that all people have the rights to learn about the Covid-19 pandemic and that they are required to do so. However, we see that many members of the audience are still not well served by the media in this manner, including children and young teenagers. There is currently just a handful of journalism and study materials on Covid-19 dedicated to them.
Starting from the middle of last year, Visual Interaktif Kompas (VIK) has been trying to produce contents geared towards these younger audiences. We developed a webtoon comic series and a news game, Virion, to tell stories about science behind the pandemic. We are glad that they received a warm welcome from teachers, actors of education, and organizations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and Kavli Foundation.
We are now continuing Virion to help explain the social implications of Covid-19 to children and young teenagers. The Teacher Avan series tells about the divide in digital access and education. This time we complement the narrative with compact study material about the internet, so that children will hopefully be able to better understand the issue.
We created this series based on interview and secondary sources such as Pew Research Center data (for US internet speed and other data related to internet access) and Central Bureau of Statistics of Indonesia (for Madura's demographics data as well as Indonesian smartphone ownership and internet speed data).
We would be very happy if teachers and parents are willing to use it as a study material.
Kompas.com would like to thank you for reading, and also the National Geographic Society for supporting this series.
There are some terms in webtoon content that you or your child may not understand. Therefore, we feel the need to provide learning material. You can access the material by downloading it at this link.