STEMify Nepal

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Susan Bhatta

Background

• Born in 2005 AD.
• Originally from Gorkha. Born and raised in Kathmandu.
• Completed A levels from Trinity International College.
• Religion: Agnostic
• Rationalist in other’s view, Realist in mine.
• Passion: Sleeping
• Future goals: Study Maths

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Why STEMify?

1. Always wished I was introduced to scientific method and essence of STEM a bit earlier.
2. Teaching being one of my passion.
3. Wanted to try something new and evaluate my own teaching skills
4. Irritated by pseudoscience floating around internet
5. Self satisfaction of doing something impactful.

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Baseline Data

1. Only 3% students choose Science after SEE: National Education Board (2022 AD).
2. By 2030, there will be a global shortage of more than 85 million tech workers, representing $8.5 trillion in lost annual revenue, according to management consulting firm Korn Ferry, based in Los Angeles.

Data shows:

Fig.1: Decrease in percentage of STEM students

Fig.2: Lesser amount of Students take Opt maths, even lesser take opt science (exact no: 1068 students take opt science) in their junior year of high school.The data is from 2076 BS.

Fig.1

Fig.2

What I did?

1. Created a course to ignite interest in STEM among early teenagers.
2. Did fifteen days long workshop sessions about essence of STEM on Shree Dullab Mavi Secondary School, Gorkha.
3. Taught 30 students of grade 6 -8 in that session.
4. Added more people in the team as mentors and got permission from 2 more schools.(Sessions not started yet due to some changes in the plan)

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Challenges

Funding

Our project required decent amount of funding. We had to buy materials for science demonstration.

Experience

None of the mentors of STEMify Nepal (including me) had any experience of teaching before. Everything was new to us which affected the project’s effectiveness.

Communication skills

We believed that: If we understand, we can make others understand as well’. This was a wrong ideology.

How I solved those problems:

1. For funding I convinced AuraED and collaborated with them.
2. I consulted with my teachers regarding how I can make my students learn more effectively
3. I took feedbacks from my students and tried my best to improve throughout the project.

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Project Milestone:

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Impact 1: Learning to Question????

• Questioning being the most fundamental thing.
• Core Idea of STEM not being based on memorisation of facts.
• No question is bad
• Students started questioning

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Impact 2: Introduction to essence of the Scientific Method!

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Taught them scientific method:

• Step by Step process for problem exploration.
• Empirical evidence.
• Continuous improvement and learning:

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What I learned?

1. Understanding the concept of the subject is not enough for teaching
2. Stakeholder outreach
3. While simplifying any concept, some information gets lost, so the teacher should make sure not to mess the core idea of the topic.
4. Importance of preplanning

If I had more time, I would:

1. Start the project digitally.
2. Study a bit of child psychology.
3. Add more hands on activities on the course.
4. Collaborate with more schools and shorten the workshop period.
5. Start a non profit organization: create a network of high school and college graduates( from science stream) who are willing to work to promote STEM education in Nepal.

Special Thanks to:

1. Akar Nepal Team for giving me such a great opportunity and guiding me throughout the process.
2. Parikshit dai for being the best mentor that I had till date and helping me in each and every step , from planning to implementation of the project. Also for teaching me some other cool stuffs (this are out of topic so I prefer not to elaborate).
3. AuraED for assuring both financial and human resource need.
4. Dullab Mabi School for collaborating with STEMify.

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Thank You!