STEM Education in Africa: Changing the Equation

This year we had our biggest program ever with 3 camps held simultaneously for primary school, middle school, and high school students. We added new science units in biology and earth sciences for our primaries, a week-long architecture program at a local university for our middle schoolers, and theatre, dance, and drawing for the two groups. Our high school camp focused on programming, offering for the first time ever in Mali a high school computer science curriculum equivalent to that being introduced in the world's most developed countries.

Thanks to your generosity we were able to offer full scholarships to 21 public school students that would not have otherwise been able to attend. The students came from public schools in Lafiabougou and Badalabougou in Bamako and we had one special student who came from the neighboring town of Kati each day. You can see most of the students in the picture above.

Mali has an increasingly segregated school system where only poor students attend public schools due to the severe lack of resources the government can devote to them. iNERDE is one of the few educational programs in Mali that gives public school students access to an enriched environment and integrates public and private school students. The public school students typically are behind their peers in private schools academically so we have to dedicate a lot of resources to make this work. It does work, however. Malian society retains a strong element of social solidarity and we constantly see the more advanced kids helping the kids who are struggling - and better learning themselves in the process. We've also seen some of the public school kids that have been coming to our camps for successive years making extraordinary strides in their intellectual development.

Many of our students came this year for the robots as word of our AERobot program last year and the success of Mali's National Robotics Team at the FIRST Global competition in Washington, DC spread around the country. They got a full dose of robots this summer, with primary school students programming AERobots, middle school students the wheeled VEX IQ robots and high school students working on autonomous robots in simulation as well as programming the sliver medal winning REV robot built by TEAM Mali for FIRST Global. Our middle school and high school camps also benefitted from the participation of several members of the National Robotics Team who gladly shared their experience and inspiration.

This is the third year I've taught in our summer camp. One of the most gratifying things to me is to see kids coming back for their second or third year and to see how alive their intellects have become. At the beginning of the summer we usually ask everyone what they want to become when they grow up - in the first and second year the universal answer for boys was "soccer player". While the boys still love soccer, this year there wasn't a returning boy ... or girl .. we didn't give an elaborate answer like they wanted to invent nanorobots to cure genetic diseases or use radiotelescopes to study black holes.

We also have teachers that returned to us for their 2nd, 3rd or even 4th year and it is also very gratifying to hear them talk about how the summer camp has changed them as teachers. We are also seeing in Bamako some of the schools talking about teaching STEM. This is a tetonic plate shift for Mali.

You have contributed to great things in Mali and we've taken a significant step together to making the world a better place for all of us. Thank you.

Michael Leventhal / Chief Nerdy Development Officer / textscience@gmail.com