Day 2 - Mabogo Junior secondary School

Today we attended our first school of the project, Mabogo Junior Secondary School in Palapye - and what a way to kick off our workshops. We began with a warm welcoming from the teachers and heads of school, and were greeted into the hall with a song from the pupils.

We gave a brief introduction to engineering and then got started with our first class of the day, making paper straw rockets. The children did really well in problem solving and working in their teams, and the element of competition in the launching of the rockets gave rise to so much joy and excitement. Moving onto our second workshop, the next class created prosthetic hands. The students really dove into the task, talking about joints and tendons in the fingers as they crafted. When testing the hand to pick up a ball, they were all incredibly successful and so happy with their achievement.

The third workshop of the day was the stethoscope model. The students completed this activity in record time, asking questions and problem solving along the way. I believe they enjoyed being able to hear each other’s heartbeats, just like a real stethoscope. Our final workshop of the day was a brand new one - the Human maze, where the children had to programme eachother out of a maze using block commands. Everybody had so much fun walking through the mazes, and the students did really well communicating within their teams, and learning the concept of coding.

As we said a fond farewell to the school heads, we were so kindly gifted some beautiful art pieces created by the students to take back to Glasgow.