Ed Tech and STEAM in Rwanda
Working with my colleagues in Rwanda has been highly rewarding, as their strong sense of community and brilliant resourcefulness have taught me a thing or two about playful, hands-on STEAM learning. In May 2022, I had the amazing opportunity to visit my friends in Kigali and experience first-hand what they they’re working on and dreaming up.
In the photo to the left, students are working on a lesson where they’re learning about circuits and electricity. In addition to building simple circuits with locally available materials, they ended up designing and building whole model houses with front porch lights!
What started out as a group interest in attending the annual eLearning Africa Conference in Kigali, Rwanda ended up becoming the first post-COVID international travel my colleagues in the Tech and Play initiative and I engaged in for 2022. We’ve been working with the Right to Play organization in Kigali as our Rwandan partners in promoting playful, hands-on engineering education since early last year, but all of our meetings with international partners had been online because…well… pandemic. But when the eLearning Africa conference (which, as a pan-African organization, hops from country to country each year) announced that they would be holding their meeting in our partners’ backyard and /gasp! / IN PERSON, a bunch of the rest of us got curious, and then excited. Now, I’m going to say upfront that traveling internationally while the pandemic was not entirely over was definitely stressful. In fact, rules about testing and mask wearing were literally changing day to day while we were there, and a few of my colleagues ended up missing their flights back home because they caught COVID mid-trip and had to isolate at the hotel. But all in all, this trip was absolutely worth it — nothing beats meeting folks in person, getting to visit their schools and workshops, and making authentic connections between humans.
