Uplift Jamaican Schoolchildren Through Science

Checking feedback is important to us, as a quality control measure - after all, we are scientists!

We ask our student participants about their perception of science, their interests, their past interactions with scientists and try to get an idea of their future outlook.

Here go responses from high schoolers!

Students came with a positive attitude! 98.2% were excited about being selected for the workshops and 99.2% were cognizant of the importance of attending university.

The majority, 83% had not interacted with scientists before, and 95.6% reported that the interaction with scientists influence the way they now think of science.

At the end of the day, the number who considered a career in science (see pie chart) increased from 61.2% to 86.3%. Overall, we saw a shift in the level of interest in science (see red to blue shift in line chart) - Yayyy!

These students are on the ball, and were certain to let us know that we have some more work to do – some students indicated (gave a score less than 8/10 – see plot with blue dots!) that the teachers were not fully able to help them to understand what they were doing.

They also contributed to our future planning – the majority of students showed an interest in doing more of these activities in after-school programs at their school – we will definitely incorporate this into our plans!

Thank you for helping us to influence how GenerationNEXT receives science! Please encourage your network to jump on board!!

Every now and then we switch things up!

You are already aware that you enable us to use science to reach kids in Jamaica, but did you know that you also facilitate life-enriching experiences for undergrad student volunteers as well? Here is a description of one student's experience - Thank You for helping us to give her this experience!!

My personal experience...

Teaching the children in Jamaica was such an incredible experience. They were incredibly polite and eager to learn, and it made me wonder if kids here in the United States would have appreciated and grasped what we were doing in the same way that the Jamaican students did. I honestly did not expect the children to be so happy doing science experiments and answering questions. I thought I would have to force them to participate but I was completely wrong. They were incredibly keen and at some points even took the lead in the experiments. As soon as the first group of students came in and put on their lab coats and gloves, one little girl said “Yeah, I change my mind, I want to be a scientist” and it made all the work we put in to prepare for the workshops worth it.

            Preparing for the workshops entailed creating an appropriate lab manual for the students, my first such experience! I thought it would involve throwing out ideas for different experiments and then tailoring the language in a way that made sense to younger children. After completing the manual, I see that there is so much more thought that goes into the design. Presenting them to the studnts experiments was a completely different experience than I expected. The questions we came up with and the specific background information we needed to deliver to the students felt a little foreign when actually standing in front of a group of children. For the most part, delivering the material was easy and came natural, but then there were a few moments where the kids were just so smart and caught me off guard with their questions and my partner had to help me out in answering them. When things didn’t go quite as I had expected them to, I relied on my fellow classmates and if I truly needed their help, I knew they would be there for me.

            The day felt like a blur but also like an entire lifetime all at once. Not only did the students learn from us, but I learned from them as well. I realized that I should expect more from myself, if I can impact over 250 students in one day the way we did, then I can positively influence countless people throughout my lifetime. That day is not one that I will easily forget and I hope that I will make a positive impact on those around me on many more days to come.