Maru-a-Pula School alumna Dr Dithapelo Medupe (’04) has earned a place in Botswana’s entrepreneurial history for inventing an educational game based on the interpretation of ditaola (divining bones used by traditional healers). Medupe, who is currently on internship at Letsholathebe Hospital in Maun, visited MaP on 15th September to demonstrate how the game works.
In 2010, during an African Practice course at Stanford University, she realized that she could use binary code to make ditaola speak any language that uses the alphabet. Having seen her grandfather use ditaola in her formative years, Medupe had no trouble cracking the code of the centuries-old practice. By 2014, she had accomplished her goal of creating an African Scrabble, naming it Temalo Code and Decode in honour of her grandfather.
‘’You use the African bones to write words using the mathematics of computers,’’ said Medupe. ‘’Other players memorize a key to decoding the word and they use their memory to crack the word you have written for them.’’
The African bones are square, wooden chips engraved with West African hieroglyphs. Ditaola are sacred to traditional healers; understanding their symbolism is a divine gift. The word can be determined by the coder or derived from general knowledge flashcards. This allows for the game to be used as edutainment across a wide range of subjects. The game tests memory, vocabulary and spelling, while introducing children to the basic computing concepts of binary coding and decoding.
Above all, Temalo Code and Decode celebrates our African heritage. The game has been endorsed by linguistics professor and coding expert Dr Joseph Tsonope, who feels that the game is more advanced than the modern binary coding system, and should be implemented across schools in Botswana. Tsonope also recommended that the game be played by children ages twelve and above.
Dr Medupe recently presented her invention to the Ministry of Education. She challenges the Maru-a-Pula student body to play the game and suggest ways in which it can be improved. Furthermore, she hopes that her MaP alumna status will inspire the students to invent something of their own one day.
‘’MaP led me to Stanford, which led me to my invention,’’ she said. ‘’I am the first Motswana to invent a unique, mathematical board game, and it’s all thanks to MaP!’’
The game can be ordered in Botswana for P450 by sending a message to: https://mobile.facebook.com/TemaloCode. This version is hand-crafted by a combination of local carpenters, printers and tailors. In the UK and US, it is available for $30 plus shipping from https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/temalo-code-and-decode. Funds raised from sales will be put towards the development of a mobile application for the game.
~ Morongoa Mosetlhi