On 23-24 September 2013, the GalileoMobile team members left the Hotel Eureka in Kampala very early in the morning to reach Ndjee S. S. School in Bombo town. During these two days, GalileoMobile performed activities with teachers and students and presented a Café-Sci session. Over 1,100 scholars attended our activities, a real record of public for GalileoMobile.
Arriving at the school
Our activities started with an opening talk after the team was introduced by the students coordinators. We proceeded with our first session of the teachers workshop, when we were caught by surprise by a room filled with 50 teachers! This made our first morning and we broke for lunch.
Opening talk
In the afternoon we performed activities with students of four different classes. Later in the day, GalileoMobile presented a Café-Sci session, in which Fabio talked about the fragility of planet Earth and the life on universe. We also took the opportunity to ask some students to teach us astronomy-related words in their local languages. In fact, in Uganda, over 50 local languages are spoken!
The students taught us astronomy terms in their local languages
During our second day of activities,we worked with teachers in the morning and with four full classes of students in the afternoon.
The teachers workshops are comprised of several activities: an introduction to both the material used during the workshop and to the inquiry-based teaching technique, a demonstration of some activities of the GalileoMobile handbook of activities, a session on how to assemble and point the Galileoscope and an introduction to the astronomical software Stellarium. The workshops are endorsed by the Galileo Teacher Training Programme. The sessions with students consisted in six different activities, all taken from our handbook of activities: The Earth’s orbit, The Earth as a Peppercorn!, Building a heliocentric model, The Rotation of the Sun, Galileoscope pointing and Stellarium.
Teachers peering through the Galileoscope during the Teachers Workshop
Ndjee is a boarding Secondary School located at the village of Bombo, over 40 km away from Kampala. Over 2,000 scholars study there. Worth noticing is that they are very well organised, meaning that they elect their coordinating students and even their prefect. These students were responsible for helping the GalileoMobile during our stay. Ndjee’s students were also very curious and quick learners. “I have never answered so many questions in my life at once”, said our team member Nuno after the Café-Sci Session.
Let your light shine
