By The Citizen Reporter  
Iringa. Motivating young people in Tanzania to become adept in science subjects, is a debate today when the country struggles to restructure its education system.The driving un-implemented strategies are restructuring instruction into learner-centred approach, improving curricular materials and ensuring teaching and instructional personnel.

“Science subjects are not difficult as most of the students think, it is just lack of proper teaching and sometimes incompetency of teachers that make it difficult,” notes Joseph John, a science student at Mkwawa University

The recent exercise performed by US Peace Corps Volunteers at Mkwawa University College of Education (MUCE) offered a simple, but a vital solution to the  problem. Students gathered around a group of large white tents, erected as part of MUCE's celebration of the 50th anniversary of the founding of its parent institution, the University of Dar es Salaam.

The tents housed exhibits from each of the specialties of MUCE: education, humanities, and science. Most of the tents featured posters of current research as well as bound theses and dissertations of graduates.

In the science tent, however, a large crowd had gathered around another exhibit, a secondary school science laboratory assembled from locally available materials.

This particular exhibit was staffed by two secondary school students, as well as two US Peace Corps Volunteers: Peter McDonough, their teacher, and Aron Walker, an instructor at a nearby teachers college.

The students showed how they learned science at their school, demonstrating low cost laboratory flame sources and explaining the manufacture of biochemical reagents from materials found in the market.

More than just show and tell, the students engaged the crowd in experiments: spinning bicycle wheels, testing botanical indicators, and powering up a hand-built electrical motor. The ever-changing mix of education students, university instructors, and members of the general public launched an endless stream of questions -- what is this here? How do you make this? How can we teach this concept? -- and the students and Volunteers alike disseminated advice and engaged them in further experiments.

The crowd was almost non-stop, eight hours a day, for six days; hundreds of education stakeholders engaged with the exhibit, many returning day after day.

Several rising educators described the presentation as "transforming," and that it left them with the possibility and excitement of hands-on methods for teaching science, even at the most remote schools. "I have seen a new way to teach," remarked one education student after using a hand mirror and a bucket of water to reveal the many colours in white light. Another described the use of local materials as "so simple and so obvious -- all of Tanzania should be doing this."

In addition to teachers, several classes of secondary students visited the exhibit. Both they and their teachers reacted with excitement and surprise as McDonough's students demonstrated the use of Benedict's solution to test for glucose in a food sample, eagerly watching a spoon of bright blue liquid turn green, yellow, and finally cloudy red-orange, exactly as they had memorized but in reality had never seen.

Perhaps the most moving of the visitors was a class of deaf students. McDonough recalls teaching through a sign translator and that "the students would sign back 'we understand!' even before the translation was finished, attesting to the communicative power of hands-on activities."

"Indeed," remarked McDonough, "That is the whole point -- awell-conceived activity will teach the concept completely." Particular touching for current educators was observing the depth of knowledge McDonough's students showed in their explanations. "These girls understand so much," remarked one teacher now studying at MUCE, "They have a much clearer understanding of the concepts than students taught with traditional methods."

Visitors were all the more surprised to learn that the students attended a village school with no running water, four hours from the nearest paved road. In a presentation at a round table discussion midway through the week, Walker suggested how this was possible.

"Students must do science to learn science. When students do experiments themselves, when they make their own observations and from them discover scientific principles, they gain a far deeper and much more memorable understanding of how their world works."

MUCE invited Walker to join the University’s  Dean of Science, the chief Regional School Science inspector, and the regional director of Secondary Education in a discussion on how to improve secondary level science education. Walker specifically addressed the benefits of hands-on science and the possibilities afforded by locally available materials.

"Whenever I present these ideas in theory," reflected Walker, "most people react with skepticism. It is just so far beyond the norm of what is 'possible,' this idea that even a poor village school can teach first rate experimental science. But when they went out to the science tent and did the experiments, when they saw Peter's students teaching, there were these reactions of joy, that really, this is possible."

One of the students presenting the exhibit summarised the point very well. "Doing experiments is the best way of learning science. And you can do experiments with very ordinary things, things that we can find even at our school."

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