STEM education tutoring initiative

STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics) is typically used when addressing education policy and curriculum choices in schools to improve competitiveness in science and technology development. In developed countries such as United States, Germany, France, and China, STEM education is really supported by the government and many NGO because the demand in scientists and engineers is really increasing. Those generations of scientists and engineers will work on the most challenging human problem of our time which are climate change, population growth, food security, etc,…In contrast, in developing countries like Madagascar, it is not yet really supported. Our education system is the same as it has been since our independence in 1960. No innovation has been made. Most of the things that we learn in class have not even a practical application in our lives in Madagascar. For example, we learn and focus a lot about history of different countries at class but we learned a little about ours. It is because of the old system which is a French system. 

In my opinion, it is critical to prepare the young generation to a new form of knowledge in which they can flourish. That is why the idea of teaching STEM to kids came up in my mind. I especially focused on coding. Why coding? Because I find coding teaches us how to think. When you code, you teach a computer to do a certain task. However, to be able to teach a computer, you need to be as precise and logic as possible.  And also being a coder is always practical in the field of work. Since we are in the digital world at the moment, it is important for everybody to understands how this kind of world works.

These kids that I taught were around 17 and 12. The material I used to teach them coding is the Arduino circuit board. Being a prototyping circuit, Arduino offers the possibility to do build simple electronics project quickly with few lines of code. One of the demonstrations that I taught them is to blink a lot of LED (Light Emitting Diode) like a traffic light. They were so amazed when they saw it. There is no more powerful tool for teaching than a real experiment.  

When I received my acceptance letter from Lafayette College, I knew I had to find someone to help me to keep this project. Fortunately, my friend Josue was interested in that project. Instead of gathering local kids in my village, we tried to introduce it in a real school. I discussed with the principal of my old school if they want us to introduce the project in their classes. She agreed although she admitted that she knows nothing about computer. So, we had to be the one who leads this project. It is a very small school with no more than 10 students. That allowed us to mentor the students closely. Our approach teaching approach to those students was using the software Scratch. It is worldwide used software for teaching kids how to code. I did this project for a month before I flew to the United States but I kept in touch with my friend Josue about what they are doing now.

When we taught them, we used our own laptop but we only had two. It was not enough. To add more, we used a raspberry pi. It is a small board computer that can work with any TV screen. You can get from Amazon around 35 dollars US. It was the little innovation that we brought to fulfill our need.