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."