51³Ô¹ÏÍø

In October 2012 PhD students Naomi Nickerson and Adam Billing travelled Ghana, with the Lightyear Foundation, bringing practical science to schools.

In October 2012 PhD students Naomi Nickerson and Adam Billing (both Physics) travelled to Accra, Ghana, with 16 other volunteers from the Lightyear Foundation, an organisation bringing practical science to schools there. Naomi reports on their involvement, which was coordinated by Dr Simon Foster (Outreach).

“How do you change someone’s life using an old plastic bottle and a handful of dirt? Seems tricky, but when I was given the opportunity to travel to Ghana with the Lightyear Foundation as a science teacher, this is exactly what I found myself doing.

In October Adam and I, both students from the Doctoral Training Centre in Controlled Quantum Dynamics, travelled to Accra with 16 other volunteers from Lightyear equipped nothing but a carrier bag containing string, plastic straws, bottles and things that we could find lying around on the street, with the aim of bringing practical science to Ghana’s students and teachers.

Despite being far better off than many of her war-torn and corrupted West African neighbours, with 95% of its children in school and the option of progressing to university with good grades, Ghana remains one of the world’s poorest countries.  Schools are rarely little more than an empty room with a blackboard, and experiments are usually unheard of. But with our bag of (very) cheap tricks we travelled the country showing pupils how they could demonstrate lensing with a bag of water, aerodynamics with a ball and string, or filter water using rocks, dirt and a plastic bottle.

I was not new to science communication and have had plenty of experience explaining and demonstrating to children in the UK, but I have never found the experience as challenging or rewarding as in Ghana, where creativity and improvisation are constantly needed. But whatever I may have gained from the experience, it is easier to see that the impact on those we were teaching was greater still.

Naomi Nickerson demonstrates how the human eye work with the aid of a tennis ball

After returning to England we received an email from the headteacher of one of the schools we had visited explaining how one of his pupils, Fuseini, had been in our water filtration class. Afterwards Fuseini went home and told his father what he had learnt in school that day. Together they decided that instead of drinking water directly from the borehole at home they would pass the water through cloth to filter it first. So pleased with what his son had learnt, Fuseini’s father came into the school to explain to the headmaster what they had done and how it had improved the water they are now drinking.

2012 was the first year 51³Ô¹ÏÍø students were involved, and as more and more schools in Ghana are asking us to visit them, we need even more people to take part. In 2013 Lightyear will be making more trips, teaching more science, and changing more lives than ever before.

For more information about the Lightyear Foundation visit: www.lightyearfoundation.org