TEACHER PRESENT THEIR OWN ENGINEERING UNITS!
At Yiya, we just concluded our Term 3 teacher workshop, the final teacher workshop for the 2018 academic year!
The excitement was high as the workshop approached since teachers were looking forward to sharing the technologies that students had made in Term 2. This was the first time that our partner teachers designed their own engineering lessons and they were very proud to show off the results from students! The Yiya field team has been faithfully supporting these teachers throughout Term 2 as they developed their units and implemented them in the classroom. It was so exciting to finally bring everyone together to show off the amazing engineering projects they had designed! The technologies that teachers designed units around were: organic pesticides, low-cost greenhouses, and cultivation and application of indigenous microorganisms.
On the first day of the workshop, our partner teachers from the 6 Yiya pilot schools in Northern Uganda reflected and shared experiences on what it was like to design and teach their own engineering lesson plans in Term 2. By the end of Term 2, each school was able to complete the engineering design process through the CREATE step. On the second day of the workshop, the Yiya team helped teachers plan their lessons in Term 3, in which their students will complete the remaining steps of the engineering design process with their prototypes: the TEST and IMPROVE steps.
Sharing about how it feels to design an engineering lesson on his own, Teacher Moses from St. Katherine Girls School said “It is not easy designing our own lessons but with time, it will be easy” and Teacher Otim Ambrose from Archbishop Orombi Secondary School said he and all the teachers “appreciated the Yiya team for training us on how to design engineering lessons and also for giving us some materials to facilitate our lessons!”
We were so thrilled so see how our first cohort of educators have really grown into the role of designing engineering lessons from the subjects they teach at school. In addition, the feedback they gave each other on the lessons they designed was so constructive and tailored to both project-based learning and the national teaching syllabus. Mr. Edrine Ssemwanga, a recent graduate from Ashesi University in Ghana and our newest team member at Yiya, had this to comment about this workshop “I learnt that if you want to teach the students well, then teach their teachers right.” He added that “Yiya is indeed making learning in Northern Uganda ‘REAL’”. Read here to find out how we make learning REAL!
At this workshop, teachers were also trained on how they will teach students to improve their Gravity Lights prototypes (the technology that they created in Term 1 during our environmental engineering unit) in time for the Annual Yiya Interschool Engineering Competition & Showcase!
Do you want to see all the technologies that our teachers have trained their students to make since last year? Then, please come and attend our inter-school engineering competition this October 6th at St. Katherine Girls School in Lira District!