About the Founder
The background and mission behind SchoolICT
Last Updated: August 2026
SchoolICT began as one teacher’s answer to a simple problem: students were reading about ICT but rarely getting to practise it. Ruwan Mangala Suraweera, an Information and Communication Technology teacher in Sri Lanka, built the site so any student — anywhere in the world — can open a lesson, run a live simulator, and check their own work, in their own language, for free.
🔗 Connect on LinkedIn🔴 1. Educational Background
Ruwan graduated from the University of Kelaniya in 1999 with a B.Sc. in Physical Science, majoring in Statistics, Computing and Pure Mathematics. That mix still shows in the lessons. The statistics side shaped how the quiz banks and results tracking score a student fairly, and the pure mathematics side is why the logic-gate, Boolean and number-system simulators follow the formal rules step by step instead of jumping to an answer.
On 1 December 2013 he completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Education at the Open University of Sri Lanka. That training changed how every lesson is written. Teaching theory forces you to picture what a learner already knows before you explain the next step, which is why each lesson here opens with a plain worked example before any definitions arrive.
🟡 2. Experience in Education
Since 2008 he has taught ICT in the Sri Lankan government school system. A large part of that job is watching where students get stuck, and the same handful of topics come up every single year: truth tables, number base conversion, Karnaugh maps, Pascal control flow, and database keys. SchoolICT exists so a student can go back and practise exactly those topics on their own, as many times as they need.
Those sticking points are not unique to one country. The same ideas sit inside Sri Lanka’s O/L and A/L ICT syllabuses, Cambridge International 9618, and AP Computer Science A, so the lessons are written to bridge across all three where the topic genuinely lines up. A built-in language bar then lets a student read the same lesson in Sinhala, Tamil, English and other languages without losing the technical terms. One hard rule guides every build: if a student needs a paragraph of explanation before they can press the first button, the lesson is wrong and gets rebuilt.
🟢 3. Software Development Journey
Before building browser-based lessons, he wrote full desktop and server systems. One was a Human Resources Management System for the Faculty of Applied Sciences at the University of Sabaragamuwa. Others were database systems for manufacturing floors, written in C++, SQL and Visual Basic.
Those projects taught a lesson that carried straight into SchoolICT: software running in a factory or a payroll office cannot afford a silent failure. A wrong answer delivered confidently is worse than an error message. That is why the simulators here validate what a student types before they calculate, and show the working rather than only the final result.
🔴 4. How These Lessons Are Built
Every lesson on SchoolICT follows the same internal build standard. Each one pairs a readable LMS lesson with an interactive learning tool that carries live simulators — logic gates, number systems, CPU scheduling, SQL queries, HTML preview and more — so students learn by doing, not just by reading. There are no external JavaScript frameworks and no CDN dependencies, so a lesson keeps working after the network drops and can be installed on a phone like an app.
Lessons are grouped by grade and competency to match the syllabus, and each tool is scoped to its own wrapper so one simulator can never break the styling of another. You can browse the full set from the SchoolICT home page, or try the hands-on learning Game Hub to revise a topic through play.
🟡 5. Free and Open to Learners Everywhere
SchoolICT is free to use. There is no paid tier and no email wall, and once a lesson has loaded it keeps working offline, so a student on a slow or shared connection is not shut out. A student account is optional; it only exists so learners can save their own results and teachers can follow a class, and that progress stays tied to the student who created it.
Reaching students beyond Sri Lanka meant taking language seriously. The lesson bar translates the surrounding explanation into many languages while protecting the ICT terms a student is meant to learn, so the meaning stays intact rather than turning into a rough machine translation. The goal is plain: a learner should be able to open any lesson, read it in a language they are comfortable with, and start practising within seconds.
🟢 6. How This Site Is Funded
SchoolICT is free and stays that way. Running costs are covered by advertising displayed on the site. Advertisers have no say over which lessons get built or what they teach, and student progress is never shared with them.
If a lesson gives a wrong result or a page is unclear, the contact form is the fastest way to reach him. Corrections from students and teachers are the main reason several lessons on this site have been rewritten, and that feedback is always welcome.