Engineering is Elementary – Oysters and Pearls

Holiday Training – January 2015

I arrived in Gulu on a Saturday afternoon, not sure what to expect from the next two weeks. As a volunteer with the Oysters & Pearls holiday training program, I knew about the class materials and basic program setup. As I quickly learned however, there was much more to the program than just the teaching.

Joining Sandra and the instructors, I spent the weekend assisting with logistics — the little details that I had never considered, but had to be completed. Where were all the plates for the dining hall? Could we borrow mattresses for students that didn’t bring their own? Why was the electricity off in the classrooms? These and a hundred other small-but-crucial tasks had to be settled, even as students started arriving on Sunday afternoon.

Classes began immediately on Monday, and continued through the week. Sighted students were sorted into one of three classes — Engineering for the Future, Introduction to Robotics, or Advanced Robotics. As the classes delved into new materials and lessons, I watched the projects grow increasingly complex. Since I constantly moved from room to room, I saw the classes develop in snapshots. What started on day one as a collection of wires and boards became a functioning light display, then a

Engineering Camp at Gulu

It was great to be back in Gulu for my third time at the Oysters & Pearls holiday training. This was the first year we had an engineering camp designed just for girls! Eighteen girls attended the training, sixteen from secondary school and two from primary school level. In the beginning everyone was very quiet but they warmed up quickly by the end of the first day.

The first week the girls designed and created water filters. It was exciting and inspiring to watch their experimenting. Their engineering challenge was to:

Design a water cleaning process to provide clean drinking water to the girls’ dormitory.

The sample water we provided them was particularly unpleasant. We used tea leaves, mud, dirt, flowers and other various plant life, and some insects to create a nasty brew of “dirty water” that they had to clean. Their process had to include filtration and purification, and the success of their designs was evaluated based on budget, cleaning time, and quality of the water after cleaning. At the end of the week, a panel of nine teachers examined samples of the water after each team of students had cleaned it. The panel (including me) smelled the water, observed its appearance, shook it to see

A Ticket to Uganda

A quiet night spent by the Nile River

I can remember my first conversation with Sandra Washburn of Oysters & Pearls…it was like it was yesterday. I was spending time in my hometown, Boston, teaching some workshops at the Artisan’s Asylum. Pacing my hotel room on a dreary, rain filled day I spent about an hour giving Sandra information about what I felt were the best ways to educate a population about technology. I had my hands full working with SparkFun Electronics to help achieve this goal in the United States, where we partnered with people like the Artisan’s Asylum, M.I.T., various library systems, IT-oLogy, thousands of schools, camps, organizations and other well intentioned people. Teaching Introduction to Electronics and Soldering in Uganda

Sandra was talking about doing the same thing in Uganda, but with much less existing or supportive infrastructure, and for a population that sometimes has never even seen a computer before. I gave her as much information as I could and promised to connect her to a man I

Thanks to Hockaday for Introducing Us to EiE

We are so proud of our Engineering is Elementary program and the difference and influence it has made on our young students. I came to find out about this fantastic program from Amy Banks, a science teacher at the Hockaday School in Dallas, Texas.

The Hockaday School now has a post on their website recounting our initial discussion and how they were instrumental in introducing this wonderful program to Oysters & Pearls and sending us and our students on a great road of discovery and priceless learning. Here is a bit of what they have to say:

On October 12, 2012 Lower School science teacher Amy Banks met with Jennifer Nantale, Country Director or Nyaka Aids Orphans Project in Southwest Uganda and Sandra Washburn, Executive Director of Oysters & Pearls. Ms. Banks shared the Engineering is Elementary program and discussed how it is used with students in grades 1-4 at Hockaday. Ms. Banks encouraged her visitors to contact EiE at the Museum of Science in Boston to learn more about the program and how to apply it to their own organizations. Ms. Washburn took this advice, and met with EiE, who arranged to send two volunteers to Northern Uganda to train six teachers at the Gulu

Squeeze Them Like a Sponge: Engineering at Gulu Primary

For one week in November, I had the amazing opportunity and support of Sandra and Oysters and Pearls to continue the work of Erin Fitzgerald and Kate Sokol, who introduced the Engineering is Elementary (EiE) curriculum to Gulu Primary School in the summer, a school which is inclusive of students who are visually impaired. The curriculum has students go through a five-step process called the engineering design process, and collaborate to engineer a technology to solve a specific problem. Erin and Kate taught two of the EiE units, as the teachers observed and began to co-teach. After the two weeks, with Sandra’s help, contact with the teachers and administration was kept up. The opportunity arose to go back in November, to do more professional development with teachers, introduce another unit, and observe them teach in order to provide support and feedback. Unfortunately, Teacher Kate was unable to attend, which made the teachers and students very sad. I consider myself extremely lucky I was able to step into Teacher Kate’s role.

Engineering at Gulu Primary Erin and I excitedly geared up for our trip. Our goal was to bring minimal amounts of material, and plan with the teachers how to locally source as many materials

Engineering is Elementary: What Makes a Strong Mortor?

This week, the students are Materials Engineers, exploring the properties of various materials used in building a strong wall. Three types of soil – Clay, Loam and Sand – are explored for their adhesive properties and durability. Using their hands, mixing the different soil types with varying amount of water, the students made “rock sandwiches” which dried overnight. The following day, these were given the earthquake test (how many shakes to make them fall apart?) and observations about cracking were shared with the group.

The teachers opened the “store” for students who had prepared their Engineering Diagram and list of supplies requested. They could choose up to six scoops of the various soil types and up to 10 tablespoons of water. The gravel was already rationed in bowls.

Wall construction began in earnest outdoors with everyone getting down and dirty in the lower field. The walls were transported to the Director of Studies office for overnight drying. Friday, the students will test to failure, and a very large crowd is expected to observe.

Additional photos are in our Gallery

Engineering is Elementary: Testing for Failure

EiE (Engineering is Elementary) finished the week with the Engineering Design Process. Ask, Imagine, Plan, Create and Improve are the five steps. In the small groups of three, the students sketched plans for their bridges. After reviewing the available materials, they wrote a list of supplies that they would need to get at the Store from Teacher Kate, keeping within the constraints of the amounts of each of the materials.

Sitting with the supplies, they began to experiment how to construct the bridges. Even the teachers were in suspense of how the problem would be solved. One clever student figured out that a wiki stix could be formed in a way that would hold the popsicle stick in place and this caught on among the other groups and then we saw binder clips, transparent tape and more wikis used to fasten the sticks and then the cross beams.

Recording the amount of materials used was the final step before testing for failure. First, a barge was passed under the bridge to check that the width was adequate. After that, notebooks representing pedestrians

Engineering is Elementary: Do you know this word…Process?

Engineering is Elementary is a program designed to be used within Elementary Schools to relay the concepts of Engineering, using a hands-on approach. Two experienced teachers from Boston Museum of Science arrived in Gulu last Saturday evening and will be teaching two of their 20 modules to two groups of students.

The first stop on Sunday morning was breakfast at San Kofa Café to fortify ourselves for shopping in the market for custom designed clothes in the local African fabrics.

Orientation at the school, for Kate Sokol and Erin Fitzgerald started on Sunday afternoon with a complete tour of the campus, including visiting the inside of each dorm and classroom, the athletic fields, the kitchen and the small pine forest planted in 2005 from seedlings. Every room was orderly and swept spotlessly clean. As far as the eye could scan, there was not a single piece of trash. Our hosts, Rev Ochola and Deputy Headteacher Dolly Oryem gave a detailed history of the school, including events leading up to their Centenary in 2014.

Sixty students in two classes of 30, inclusive of blind and visually impaired students as well as sighted