Among ’90s kid’s technological invention was one of the coolest toys to play with. I grew up in a remote village which is surrounded by one of the vast water body called Chalan Beel. It was such a colourful childhood memories nobody can forget about that.
As a villager, we had no access to technology except radio, television and electricity. Internet and Computer were unimaginable in 1990 – 1998 in our area. As a country, Bangladesh enters into the Internet age in June 1996 but it was available only in some restricted areas of Dhaka city. But a great mind from my neighbourhood, an architect, a dreamer, a BUET Graduate, Mohammad Rezwanul Haque took a challenge to fight against climate change and bring quality education and technology to the deprived. He started an initiative called SSS (Shidhulai Swanirvar Shangstha) an NGO in 1998. The main goal of this NGO was to educated people about climate change and bring the school to the remote students during the monsoon season.
Most of the elementary school goes underwater in Chalan Beel neighbouring villages during this season. So he invents an idea to bring the school to the students rather than students going to school. He invents a floating school with solar panels on top and a computerized classroom inside. Floating school started its operation in 2002. This school clicked my life into a new horizon, the internet age. I was a student of that visionary school. This is one of the amazing school I’ve ever seen in Bangladesh.
One of the coolest things about this school, it provides internet access to the students from the early age of the internet in Bangladesh. Although the internet was unimaginable in most of the areas of Bangladesh we had rare access to it through this school. I started as a part-time student at this school because I had a full-time school. Actually, the computer in this school attracts me the most. I remember not sleeping the whole night when I first come to know that I am going to start learning computer from the very next day.
It was in 2002. What a colourful dream I had about my learning. I started to learn computer office applications like Microsoft Office and basic internet stuffs like browsing, using email, reading newspapers. Above everything, the internet attracts me the most. It was so exciting to me. I always thought about how this cool thing works? How those pages come to my computer while I know it is located far beyond our country. A keen interest started to grow in my mind about internet technologies. I wanted to learn, how those pages are built and how those pages are hosted, where the server is, and how the server is operated? But it was so rare kind of knowledge in early 2000 that none of my teachers knew about it. I busted them with a whole lot of questions about the internet but finally, I came to the conclusion that my questions are not going to be answered because they also had limited knowledge about it.
My quest for learning never stops. I started teaching myself about this technology using Google. But as I was a 6th-grade student who just started his high school and my English was not that satisfactory enough to make it through the knowledge gathering process and shortage of tutorials and course my learning kept going for an underrepresented time period. My school education and computer education was going side by side. But as I didn’t have a personal computer and internet connectivity, I had to wait for boat school to come and teach me all those dreamy technologies.
