NADALEEN SINGH

The com­pa­ny is called Pen­na­cool.com. At first thought, most would be­lieve it is a busi­ness in­volved in sell­ing the liq­uid snack, pen­na­cool, made pop­u­lar among the pri­ma­ry school­child­ren over the years. Well, you are wrong. Pen­na­cool.com is an on­line Sec­ondary En­trance Ex­am­i­na­tion (SEA) pro­gramme. The busi­ness, churned out of the Caribbean Cof­fee House, was the dream of John De­vaux, man­ag­ing di­rec­tor, and Phaes­suh Krom­ah, mar­ket­ing, whose son sat the SEA ex­am­i­na­tion in March.

"Af­ter many years in the cof­fee busi­ness, how long can you keep on do­ing the very same thing over and over, be­fore you get a bit bored with it? A com­bi­na­tion of be­ing a bit bored and a com­bi­na­tion of be­ing a bit slow in the cof­fee busi­ness, I said to Mr Krom­ah, we have to do some­thing new." How does it work? The SEA stu­dent has to reg­is­ter on­line, en­sur­ing that their par­ent's e-mail ad­dress is in­clud­ed. The stu­dent would then get ac­cess to ques­tions in each sub­ject area, such as math­e­mat­ics, sci­ence and Eng­lish.

Take, for in­stance, math­e­mat­ics, the stu­dent is asked to work out the prob­lem and click on sub­mit. The work­ing for the ques­tion ap­pears, en­abling the stu­dent to com­pare his/her an­swer with the cor­rect ver­sion. "By De­cem­ber 2009, we had enough stuff on­line that we were able to vis­it schools with fly­ers. We tar­get­ed about 100 schools ran­dom­ly." The re­ac­tion so far has been "good."

The ser­vice costs $25, but De­vaux said the lo­gis­tics of pay­ment are yet to be worked out. Mean­while, the stu­dent has to use the book­let to­geth­er with the Web site. "When a teacher is fin­ished teach­ing an­gles, what they would want is a set of an­gles ques­tions that is test lev­el. What they would do is go to the past pa­pers and pull an­gles alone." "Now they can just take the Pen­na­cool book­lets and pull the ques­tions. In ad­di­tion, there is free ac­cess to the on­line ma­te­r­i­al." The feed­back? Fan­tas­tic. "When we put it out in Jan­u­ary, it be­came avail­able on­line, 2,500 stu­dents reg­is­tered, just in Jan­u­ary, Feb­ru­ary and March."

Lap­top pro­gramme

Dr Tim Gopeesingh, Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter, had said the Gov­ern­ment planned to sup­ply lap­tops to chil­dren who were suc­cess­ful at the SEA ex­am­i­na­tion. De­vaux said he is in­ter­est­ed in in­stalling his lo­cal­ly-de­signed pro­gramme on those lap­tops at no cost to the Gov­ern­ment. The sky is the lim­it. "The world is ours once we do this. At the mo­ment, we are try­ing to en­cour­age some bright fel­las in Cana­da to set it up over there." "It is pos­si­ble to take this to bank ex­ams and in­to dri­ving tests, once we have the plat­form."