www.ft.com

Lourdes Corazon Santos, a petite 10-year-old fifth grader at a public school in North Fairview, a suburb east of the Philippine capital of Manila, cannot wait to tell her mother what she did on the first day of school after the long Christmas break.

That day in class, using a magnifying lens, she and her classmates found tiny specks of gold in a rock sample, after watching a video on how to classify rocks.

Lourdes has not always been as eager to tell stories about school life until her class was chosen for a year-long educational experiment in science teaching, which employs well-prepared lessons built around short video clips. "I liked best the film showing that some sea creatures, such as whales and dugong (sea cow), are not really fish but mammals; they needed to swim to the surface every now and then to take a breath just like us people," said the bright-eyed girl who lives in a poor village where people pick recyclable cast-offs from a huge garbage dump.

The innovative teaching project, called Bridgeit,is transforming science into a fun subject for Lourdes and more than 13,000 Grade 5 and Grade 6 pupils in 40 pilot schools in Manila and three Philippine provinces.

Most of the 82 teachers participating in the programme say student interest in science lessons has grown keener since last June, when they began using video in the classrooms.

Nokia, the Finnish mobile phone maker, initiated Bridgeit to promote the use of information and communication technologies in boosting the quality of elementary school instruction in developing countries.

The United Nations Development Programme, the International Youth Foundation and Pearson, the UK media and education group, which owns the Financial Times, support the project. To be sure, it is not the first time that television and video have been used in Philippine schools. Filipino educators have experimented with multimedia technology since 1964 when the Rockefeller Foundation gave grants for an educational television project using closed-circuit TV.

The country's leading broadcast company, ABS-CBN, runs an hour-long curriculum-based television programme that some schools tune into each day. Bridgeit, is different, if not better, than educational TV. It has maximum flexibility that allows the teacher to take full control. The teacher can pause the video clip to explain an unfamiliar word or to ask questions, or replay the video to help students understand the brisk English narration dashed with American slang.

"With Bridgeit, pedagogy does not adjust to TV programming but the other way around," says Zenaida Domingo, an expert on the educational application of multimedia technologies and a member of the project management team.

Bridgeit, is simple, easy technology. All the teacher needs to do is send a message on the mobile phone containing the catalogue number of the video file she wants to show.

For the programme's pilot run, the teachers can choose from 60 three-minute video clips for each grade level. The server then sends the file overnight via satellite transmission to a personal video recorder that is also used to play back the video clip on a TV set. The morning after, the clip is ready for use in the classroom.

However, the ease and convenience of using Bridgeit, are precisely what makes it expensive, by the standards of government-run schools. Cost is preventing the programme's rapid replication in the country's 36,000 public elementary schools. Three-quarters of the schools have no television sets, while one-third have no electricity at all.

Installing Bridgeit entails $1,500 per school, according to Kimmo Lipponen, Nokia director for corporate marketing. For now, the mobile phone maker and its global and local partners are footing the bill.

There is no way public schools can shoulder the cost themselves as the amount is well above most schools' annual capital expenditure budgets, according to Fe Hidalgo, under-secretary at the Department of Education and Culture.

Unless costs are cut, Bridgeit will likely be available only to a few schools that enjoy support from a few well-meaning private companies. The government may be able to afford it for highly selective uses, such as remedial classes for slow learners, says Ms Hidalgo.

The pilot run will last until March when the local school year ends. Nokia and its partners have not decided what to do next but educators are hoping the project can be redesigned to run on less expensive technology.

Both Ms Hidalgo and Ms Domingo say the project's pedagogical benefits can be achieved using cheaper devices, such as stand-alone CD or DVD players, but this would require reproduction and distribution of the video clip discs.

By the end of the school year, a formal, quantitative evaluation of Bridgeit's impact on science instruction will be made. For now, the rapid and warm acceptance by teachers, students, administrators and even parents, makes Bridgeit, a clear runaway success. However, whether they will want, eventually, to foot the bill - and could afford to - is another matter.