STEM at The Heath goes global

When Rob Rogers, Deputy Headteacher at The Heath Specialist Technology College, Runcorn, found out he was headed to Cape Town for the 6th iNet International Conference, he saw it as a unique opportunity to find out more about STEM education in Africa, and to visit his school's 'Afri-Twin' partner schools in Cape Town - Durbanville Primary, Durbanville Secondary and Alpha School. As part of the exchange visit Rob's school funded a teacher from each partner school to attend the conference, providing a great CPD experience. In this article he tells us what he discovered while he was out there, what he did with the partner schools and why he's desperately keen to return.

Rob Rogers: "For our South African colleagues this was a real eye-opener, as the way in which school funding is allocated in South Africa makes opportunities like this very rare. During the conference, Helen Ziller - a very prominent South African politician - spoke about her dream of education for all and about the importance of embracing new technologies such as the Kindle or iPad to allow children to access a vast bank of literature from a location without walls. She also shared her passion and her desire to build five centres of STEM excellence in the Western Cape to share skills and drive up standards. It was great for the conference delegates we invited along to hear a leading politician mentioning the significance of STEM and certainly made them even more receptive to the STEM lessons I was to later deliver at their schools.

"I visited Alpha and Durbanville secondary schools to deliver a STEM-themed lesson that involved getting the kids to build very simple rockets which were then fired from a compressed air chamber I had brought with me. The intention was to make this as simple as possible to allow all of the schools to replicate this with little or no financial outlay required. The students had great fun firing their rockets out of the chamber and used clinometers to measure the angle of maximum height, and we then introduced trigonometry to find out the height the rockets had climbed. Their enthusiasm and interest was clear to see and a wealth of very pertinent questions soon followed.

"The National STEM Centre in York had also kindly donated Flip video cameras to the school - the students used these cameras to capture the evidence from their experiments and to shoot their own footage of the launches. You can watch the students' film below this article.

When we departed, we left the Flip video cameras, rocket kit and a collection of Apple G4 Power Books (donated by The Heath and Runcorn CLC) with the schools in order to enable them to carry on with the STEM investigations and evidence all their progress. I hope that any work they carry out will then be sent back to us in the UK so that our own STEM club can respond with complementary work and thereby create an international forum for students. The Heath is visiting the schools again in September (20 students and three staff are going out) as part of our 'Afri-Twin' programme, and staff have been briefed to ask follow-up questions about their subsequent STEM work.

Overall the trip was a great success; seeing how South Africa funds education as well as their attempts to rebuild themselves after apartheid was amazing and if my boss lets me have the time off again...I'm gone!"

(Rob Rogers, Deputy Headteacher/Director of Specialism (Technology) at the Heath School, Runcorn)

For more information please email Rob Rogers.