SCIENCE In the House (or school)

As I read that title I imagine myself sounding like Leonard off the Big Bang Theory when they went to encourage Middle School girls to enter science related fields.

Yes,  I know I am late posting this week.  I appreciate the reminders.  The reason is that I attended the Singida Science Conference 2016 put on by the Peace Corp Volunteers in Kinampanda.  This is a village area that I drive through to get to my site.  It is the last village on the ridge line before I head down into the valley.  

This was my fourth science/math conference put on by the Peace Corp Volunteers.  They plan the activities, set a schedule, create budgets, negotiate for locations not only to have the conference but also to house the students and transport them and one teacher counterpart.  There are two main type Peace Corp Volunteers.  One group does work along the lines of agriculture or health.  The other group are assigned secondary schools to teach in.  They teach different types of subjects like English, Math, Physics, Chemistry and Biology. The teacher groups sets these conferences up.  Normally the Singida conference (Singida is a region as well as a town) are held in Singida the town.  This time they opted for a teacher's college in the village of one of the teachers setting up the conference.  This worked out good for me as it is a thirty minute drive up the mountain to their site so I just stayed in the village this weekend.

So five Peace Corp  Volunteer teachers bring four students (two girls and two boys) and one counterpart (local) teacher to the conference where they are housed, feed and encouraged to have fun learning.

The conference serves several purposes.  One is to break the monotony of normal teaching methods.  Here in Tanzania teaching normally consists of blackboard instruction and student memorization.  The problem is that very little of the knowledge takes hold in a form that can actually be used or applied to real world problems.  So this part of the conference is take lessons they have learned or memorized and now try to apply them to competitions.

Another part of the conference is to teach specific high priority life lessons in a group format and normally with a learning game involved.  For example they did a malaria limbo where they first had a discussion of ways to prevent getting malaria.  Then they did a limbo competition where each round represented not doing something they were supposed to do to prevent malaria.  If they touch the bar they "got malaria" and are out.  Another form was about HIV/AIDS.  After their discussion everyone stood in a circle and one person volunteered to be the "human" and one person the "immune system"  The rest of the students were "diseases" they tried to infect the "human" by hitting them with a soccer ball.  The "immune system" was supposed to deflect the soccer ball.  Then they introduce the "HIV virus" and they work to interfere with the "immune system" and allow the other diseases a better chance to hit the "human"

The "human" and "immune system" get ready

Another part of the conference are students doing experiments such as placing a match under a piece of paper and then doing it again with a bottle cap placed on top of the paper and the match held directly underneath it.  The paper will not catch fire (at least in the short term) because the metal is conductive and transfers the heat away from the paper.

The students also do some presentations during the conference and then each team prepares a science related presentation and gives it to the host secondary school the morning before the head home.

They do other interesting things like math games and sudoku puzzles.  But I think you all know where I am going with this:  Science competition.  At the student's age I was only so so interested in science or school at all.  But while in the military I really started to gain an appreciation and fascination with the world of science and math.  In college I loved things like the concrete canoe races and steel bridge team, which I was a proud member of at Clemson.  I joined the team late but I found the whole thing fantastic and great way to get out of the doldrum of book learning.  

This is the Clemson team atop our winning bridge (four out of five categories)

So the competitions:  River Raft-make a boat out of aluminum foil and the boat that holds the most weight without sinking wins.

 Students and Teachers anxiously waiting to see how their boat does.

Bridge competition:  Build a bridge between 26 and 35 cm long (the gap was 25 cm) using materials they buy with a science credit and the bridge that holds the most weight wins.  This competition started with a serious doubt any bridge would hold much weight.  But after several stops like they were done they all went back to the drawing board and purchased more materials to keep trying.  After an hour only one bridge failed to perform.  One bridge collapsed just before we filled the first water bottle with rocks (mark 7) and two held up under three water bottles of rocks and almost stood up to somebody standing on them.  The materials were things like drinking straws, toilet paper cores, empty soda bottles, string, tape etc.

The teachers even have to participate

It takes a lot of effort to get them to smile

This team was actually President Magufuli and Hapa Kazi Tu was his platform 

adding weight to the bridges

Egg Drop-Again they buy materials using science credits (same type of materials for the bridge) to build a container to put a raw egg in and then it is dropped.  If the egg survives it is dropped from a higher height and so on until only one team remains.

The egg drop was their first competition and they obviously were not used to this type of event because all the designs were very tentative.  The bridge was last and that was why they had more success there.  After each competition we talk about the science and real world applications of the competition.

Great job once again by the Peace Corp Volunteers!  I thank them for allowing me to hang out and try to get the kids excited about the competitions.