What happened before: four Artevelde students left Belgium at a cold Thursday afternoon on 24th of January for the heat of Cambodia, the Kingdom of Wonder. After meeting our colleagues and receiving proper instructions on our tasks we started off completely filled with excitement and motivation.
One of the challenges we received from the VVOB team was to make experiment boxes for 40 lower secondary practice schools all over Cambodia. This sounds as an easy task but you have to take our word, there is a lot more to it than just collecting materials. The first thing we had to do is run through the manuals VVOB provided last year and test the experiments we were not familiar with. In the end all our experiments had to pass some conditions. Materials should be very low cost, easy to get in Cambodia, match with the curriculum of lower secondary schools and easy to use for teachers and student teachers who do their practice in those schools.
After we decided on the 75 experiments that would be included in the boxes we had to find the correct materials for the experiments. We paid loads of visits to different markets in Takhmao and Phnom Penh. Carpenters and joiners helped making some experimental constructions. In the end we managed to find all the materials we wanted to come up with. What was left is the filling of the boxes and making specific models (for some subjects).
We finished (almost) just in time when the preparation inset training on science experiments in RTTC Kandal started. All science teacher trainers from teaching centres for lower secondary education attended this workshop that would prepare them to organize a training for the school teachers later on. During the workshop they would run through a lot of experiments once more and this was an ideal opportunity for us to introduce our experiment boxes.
The first out of two days was completely devoted to try out the experiments in the boxes. We prepared a presentation to introduce them to the teacher trainers and afterwards they were divided in groups to execute the experiments. The atmosphere during the day was excellent and we had the feeling that most of the teacher trainers were really pleased with the work we did. Now it’s up to them to promote our boxes in their college and practice schools. One thing is for sure. We have full confidence in them!
