Caoling Digital Opportunity Center – U100 Saves the Day After Typhoon Sinlaku!

The Caoling DOC is located inside Caoling Elementary School. When Typhoon Sinlaku struck in September, landslides struck the area around the school, leading to 30 hectares of land being declared a high-risk zone. The Caoling DOC and the Caoling Elementary School were evacuated to private homes in Caoling Village but there was no time to move all the needed resources and the desktop computers at school. Most of the notebook computers at the school were old and obsolete as well. Huang Guo-ren, a teacher at Caoling Elementary School said: "Fortunately, MSI Notebook donated a MSI Wind Netbook to us. This allowed us to keep teaching the kids about computers during the typhoon. It also helped teachers with their work as well. This little notebook computer really saved the day for us!"

During Typhoon Sinlaku, the U100 allowed the children to continue taking their computer classes at the temporary school.

The teaching center rendered inaccessible after Typhoon Sinlaku in early September. Fortunately, the U100 notebook was available as a stopgap measure for handling the school's administrative tasks. Community teachers were able to use it with a single-lens projector to teach their classes as normal as well.

Last year teachers at the Caoling Elementary School began taking the students on outdoor excursions to experience the beauty of their hometown for themselves and also to develop vernacular courseware. In the beginning, the collected materials could not be processed immediately, as everything had to be photographed and then researched online back at school. After the U100 was donated to the Caoling DOC however, students can now immediately record observed species, locations and environments on the U100 to provide an immediate record of Caoling's ecological wonders.