Go go Science Fair!

This morning was the first big science fair meeting. Yesterday my counterpart Narcisio and I went into all of the morning turmas (10,11,12 grade) and announced that science fair was starting. For the first meeting I decided we should do something fun so I figured we could make a timeline of the universe. That night Chris and I spent a while in the school office typing up a list of events that I wanted to put on the timeline (birth of the universe, first humans, independence of Mozambique, etc). I woke up and went to the office to see if the printer had really ran out of ink. Indeed it had, and I was writing up the table by hand before a secretary came and put in new ink cartridges. Phew. I sat down and pretended to be thinking about planificação for about 3 minutes and then prepared for the meeting. Oh, I also saw my pedagogical director and counterpart Jamal, who I think has returned from a month-long vacation.

When we started I was disappointed when it was just me, Caetano, Albino, Hilario, and one other student. But when we went over to the (unfinished) basketball court Narcisio joined us and a bunch of other students. Now it was beginning to look like a real club, which was a little rewarding I guess. We started and in my broken Portuguese I tried to explain what a timeline was and how most of the dates of the events on the timeline had to be figured out by scientists since no one was alive to write it down. I talked about the sun, the closest star to the Earth, and said it was part of a group of stars called the Milky Way. Any scientific question can be tried to be solved with the scientific method. Even the biggest question – how the universe was born – is at least partially solved by scientists. I explained that scientists saw these groups of stars, or galaxies, moving away from each other. If they are moving away from each other now, in the past they must have been closer together. This leads scientists to believe that the universe started from a very hot, dense point. About this time my counterpart Narcisio was away talking on the phone but I did notice some students nodding their heads. I had passed out three copies of the list of events that had the date, name, and description of each event, and now it was time to make the timeline.

Making the timeline was more difficult for the students, and less interesting, than I had anticipated. In retrospect, I guess I could have gone with 1mm = 1 million years, but I thought 2 mm = 1 million years was easy enough. I ended up doing the measuring but after some motivation and coercion I had a couple kids helping me make the timeline as others sat around doing nothing. My counterpart had left for I don’t know what, I think he said something about a call from Maputo. When we finished I wanted to read every event from start to finish, but by then people weren’t really interested I think (it was 11:00 and we started at about 9:30). I was so concerned with everything else I think I actually forgot to stand back for a moment and look at the 28 m string and think about the history of the universe.

By the end I was exhausted (without eating breakfast – my fault more than anything else) and I realized people probably wanted to go home. I failed to explain enough about the science fair – I just told them to come next week with three questions about any scientific topic, but I didn’t give enough information about what is science fair and the scientific method, or sample questions which could have helped them since the kids aren’t really that curious or creative. I thought that the kids would be more interested in the project, and I guess I mistook my own interest and awe in the age of the universe as the inevitable interest of the students. It may have been with some, such as Albino who is one of my favorite students and an incredibly motivated and smart person, but with most it was not so. Most students had never heard of dinosaurs. Some of them did not know that man had walked on the moon (I showed them a picture on my laptop). The events I had chosen for the timeline weren’t very interesting because the students did not understand most of them. I came away from the meeting feeling disappointed and with a feeling of failure. It had not met my expectations but then again I was expecting too much. I need to remind myself the amount of knowledge that students have here. A better project would have been a science experiment (maybe a flashy chemical reaction) to demonstrate the scientific method. These kids do not have the mental tools to fully appreciate something like a timeline of the universe or a tree of life. And I can not foolishly assume that students will be impressed with the same thing that I am.

Perhaps the trick is finding what interests them, what grabs their attention, and then bending their interest to my will…