Alice Springs

We left GemTree today and drove all the way to Alice Springs.  Once we set up at Temple Bar Caravan Park we met the owners.  Kade and I got set a task to move 2 piles of rocks to a larger pile, if we did that we would get 5 dollars each.  We we spent 30 minutes wheeling the rocks from place to place and ended with a 5 dollar note in our hands.  

Then we left to drive around the town.  We chose to visit the School of the Air.  School of the Air is for kids who live in remote outback areas that cant drive all the way to school.  They instead go to school on the internet with their teaches broadcasting live on the kids computer screens and their worksheets come in the post.  We watched 1 of the teachers in the studio talking and teaching a year 9 maths class.  Kids in the range of 1.3 million square Kilometres all do School Of the Air where they are at home and their teaches are in Alice Springs.  The size of the (classroom) is double the size of Texas, 10 times the size of England, 3 and a half times the size of Germany and a little over twice the size of France.  Kade and I donated a book for one of the kids and left a little note.  It is expensive to keep the school running because each student needs a large satellite dish set up in their backyard and the school pays for it all.  We also drove past the old Telegraph Station.  

This is an actual online lesson.

This is the radio they would have used before the internet.

(This is one of the teachers giving a maths class on a whiteboard, there is a webcam above.)

Back at the caravan we got ready to go back into town for the Night Market.  We walked around a few of the stalls and tried a few pieces of food.  We also watched some amazing street performers do some amazing things.  One of the men holds 11 Guinness World Records and beat one of them while we were there.  Then a man put a spiral spring up his nose and spun it until it came out his mouth.  They also did amazing tricks with Cigar Boxes, then one lay on on a small bed of nails while the heaviest man stood on top of him.  It then became late so we drove back to the caravan.