By Erin Fitzgerald | Country Director
It's February and that means the end of the dry season here in Uganda...and the beginning of the school year! The Ugandan academic year begins in February, with the first of three terms. That means Yiya is officially back in schools!
We prepped for the school year with two big stakeholder workshops, both held at Days Inn, Lira:
Head Teacher Kick-Off Meeting
The first workshop was our beginning-of-the-year kick-off meeting with school leaders from our six partner schools. All schools sent their Head Teachers and Directors of Study to this meeting to give feedback on the 2017 Yiya program and to collaboratively plan with the Yiya team for 2018. These school leaders had a great workshop! We spent time envisioning what the ideal outcomes of education are, as well as how Yiya helps schools to achieve that vision for their students.
Head Teachers also shared powerful stories of impact in their schools. The Head Teacher from Rapha Girls School said the Yiya program has helped her students to imagine a wider view of possible career choices for themselves, countering the stiff societal pressures that push girls in this community to marry at very young ages and not finish even their high school education. She said the girls are all talking now about becoming scientists and engineers first, and wives later! In addition, the Head Teacher from St Katherine's Secondary School shared that one of her students had won a national engineering competition with the bike-powered phone charger that she built in her Yiya lessons! This student then traveled to Kenya with her homemade phone charger to compete at an international level! The Head Teacher brought photos of the Yiya bike that traveled with the student on the plane, and even passed around the "Checked Baggage" tags that the bike wore while airborne. This star engineering student and the Yiya bike are now Lira celebrities!
All School Leaders agreed that the Yiya program has provided big benefits in their schools to both students and teachers; they explained that the Yiya program has created an energy and excitement around high school education in Lira. Although these schools are very low-income, Head Teachers offered to contribute to the Yiya program financially to show their commitment and appreciation for having it in their schools. On their own, they pledged as a group to contribute 100,000 Ugandan shillings per school (approx $28) in Term 3 as a "school subscription" to the Yiya Inter-school Engineering Competition & Showcase that Yiya holds at the end of the school year. This is a big financial commitment from these schools, and it meant so much to our Yiya team that they volunteered this contribution.
Teacher Engineering Workshop
Two weeks after the Head Teacher meeting, we were back in Lira for our Term 1 teacher engineering workshop. We refreshed teachers on the engineering design process and came up with collaborative goals for their professional development in Term 1. We explained to teachers that Yiya's focus for 2018 is teacher professional development and empowering teachers to be the lead engineering educators in their classrooms. In 2017 Yiya staff were the lead engineering educators, with co-teaching support from school teachers...now we are hoping to turn that around and be the co-teaching supports while the teachers take the lead! Teachers were very excited about this news! They set group goals for themselves, including 100% teacher attendance at all Yiya lessons, and they committed that every teacher would be the lead engineering educator for at least 1 Yiya class in Term 1.
However, the biggest highlight of the 2-day workshop, by far, was the Gravity Lights! Generous Gravity: Engineering Gravity Lights is the mechanical engineering unit that Yiya will run in schools this term. The gravity lights use a system of gears and pulleys to leverage the kinetic energy of a slowly falling weight to rapidly spin a dynamo that generates enough power to light a lightbulb for night-time reading! The teachers experimented with different gear and pulley systems, and worked to leverage beneficial gear ratios to generate the fastest speeds from the slowly falling weights. The excitement throughout the workshop was palpable and at the end when we asked for feedback, they had only two points of critical feedback:
Term 1 Teaching
This past week the Yiya lessons officially kicked off in schools, with Yiya staff and teachers running a talkshow-style speaking panel in all Yiya classrooms, where students discussed the effects of climate change on their local community. They debated possible solutions to mitigate the effects of human activity on the environment and took questions from peers in their TV talkshow. This lesson sets the stage for the importance of the gravity lights technology. Next week students will dive into the science of gear ratios and pulley systems!
Next Steps
As the Yiya field team supports teachers in schools throughout Term 1, we are also reaching out to local farmers in Northern Uganda as we research and develop the technology for our next unit for Term 2, which will focus on Agricultural Engineering. Northern Uganda is a heavily agriculturally-based economy and both students and teachers have requested a unit in this field to support their community. More updates on our Agricultural Engineering unit coming soon!
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