Day 9 - Pelaelo JSS

Our ninth day in Botswana was spent at our forth school of the project - Pelaelo Junior Secondary School. We had a delightful introduction with all of the teaching staff and heads of school, before setting up our first workshop of the day which was the debut of our cookie mining workshop. This activity highlights the environmental considerations and dangers when mining, the team decided this was an important type of engineering to highlight since mining is such a large industry in Botswana. The students were given a cookie, a map, and two toothpicks where the instructions were to build their mine (place their cookie) on a suitable and environmentally safe area and to use their mining tools (toothpicks) to dig diamonds from their mine (chocolate chips). By observing the spread of crumbs breaking the cookies, we were able to discuss how fallout and dangerous mining can spread and potentially damage the areas around us if we are not considerate of the environment.

The younger group of students also took part in the prosthetic hand workshop, using paper, straw and string to make their very own functioning hand. This was a great success from all of the teams, it was fantastic to talk with a handful of keen future Biomedical engineers in the classes! Following this, we moved on to our aeronautical/aerospace engineering workshop - paper straw rockets. This has been such a fun activity to help the students with, the element of competition enhances the motivation and drive for the students to make the best model that they can.

In the afternoon, we swapped to the older group of students and conducted some of our more complex workshops. We started with the human maze, where the teams had fun programming their friends out of our outdoor mazes using block code and problem solving as they tested their code. Next was the hydraulic scissor lift workshop. This mechanical engineering centered workshop was led by Ivy, where the students used cardboard, skewers and syringes to build a rising platform controlled by the transfer of air pressure between two attached syringes. The students worked hard in their teams, problem solving and asking for help when they needed - the results were outstanding. We ended the workshops with creative aircraft launching pads, with a final competition to complete our session. Pelaelo JSS was full of enthusiasm, creativity and driven students, we couldn't be more grateful to be apart of their learning journey.