Jamataka Primary School

Our first workshop was delivered at Jamataka Primary School. First we met with the school staff and shared the aim of our project and the activities we would undertake during our time with the pupils. We hope this also provided them with insights to practical activities they can do with the students to increase interest in STEM.

We were joined by 4 volunteers from BIUST and UoB who are or have studied engineering. (Nomsa Amos, BEng, Kealeboga Mathiba, Tsholofelo TomTom and Gofiwa Koma) We are extremely grateful to these volunteers for offering their time to teach the pupils with us. This gave the volunteers experience running our workshops, which we hope they can continue after the project ends. It was great to combine our teaching styles with the volunteers and work as a team to teach at our full potential.

In order to get the students familiar with us and our backgrounds, we first introduced ourselves and the subjects we study at University. With the assistance of the James Watt School of Engineering Graphics team, we had printed A1 posters describing each of the engineering disciplines offered at the University of Glasgow. We stuck these on the wall and the students were really interested in what each had to offer!

🚗🎈Our first workshop was balloon powered cars! This workshop conveyed both the law of conservation of energy and Newton's 3rd Law. We believe it is important to gain practical experience with these laws in order to fully understand the physics behind them. It was really great to see the students work so well in teams - an essential skill to be a good engineer. They were extremely persevering and weren't afraid to ask for further instructions.

🩺⚙️Our second workshop involved replicating a stethoscope using card, tape and balloons. This workshop stems from a biomedical engineering background and aims to teach about the principles of sound transmission, resonance and amplification. This workshop is definitely one of the team’s and the students’ favourites - it is extremely engaging and gets everyone up and moving. It is fairly easy to build and very fun to test! It was amazing to see the kids so fascinated by the transmission of the heartbeat and keen to get their heartbeat up for the purpose of the experiment!

Overall the whole team thought this workshop was extremely successful and a great start to our project. Although the students were shy at first, as soon as they were given a task they were determined to complete it and were very excited to compete and compare their designs with their friends and the team!