Saint Kizito Senior Secondary School – Distributing flowers to the visitors

The next stop for the GalileoMobile’s expedition “In the Land of Beauty” was the Saint Kizito S. S. School on 25-26 September 2013. We performed activities with teachers and students and presented a Café-Sci session, reaching over 1,000 pupils.

Saint Kizito Senior Secondary School

As usual, our activities started with the opening talk. We had to improvise since there was no room big enough to fit all students, thus our introduction session took place immediately after the student assembly, in the front yard of the school. After that, we asked the students to fill in our local Ugandan language board with astronomy-related words, in order to extend our vocabulary to as much languages as possible. This linguistic exchange has started in the previous school, as suggested by our local collaborator Betty Kituyi.

Fabio talks during the opening talk

After the opening talk, we proceeded with our first session of the teachers workshop where we demonstrated some activities from our handbook, showed the teachers how to use the Galileoscope and gave an introduction to the astronomical software Stellarium.

The rest of the day was also packed with activities. We spent the whole afternoon performing activities with the students and to wrap up a very fruitful day, Philippe presented a Café-Sci session, which was focused on the Sun.

Solar projection

In the morning of the second day, we worked with teachers and in the afternoon with other four classes of students. We performed five different activities from our handbook: The Earth’s orbit, The Earth as a Peppercorn!, Building a heliocentric model, Solar projection and Galileoscope pointing.

In the end of our stay at Saint Kitzito S. S. School, the coordinating teacher gathered the students in the front yard in a farewell ceremony. It started with dozens of students singing the school anthem. Then, the teacher asked the students what kind of gift they offer to the visitors. At this moment, students started gesturing some movements with their hands – a growing and blossoming flower. They raised the hands in a gesture of an offer, as if the flowers were thrown to us. Not only that, they sang in unison: “Thank you, thank you and thank you!” This was definitely the highest moment of our visit.

“One of the students approached me to say that she wanted to be scientist, just like us. In fact, she gave me a letter repeating the words ‘Thank you’ several times. I felt deeply touched”, said our team member Patricia.

Group picture at the end of our visit