This Saturday, STEM Guyana held its annual robotics exhibition at the Cliff Anderson Sports Hall. Since its formation in 2016, STEM Guyana has turned heads, perhaps most notably when Guyana’s first robotics team surged to a respectable tenth place (out of 165 teams) at the Global Robotics Challenge.
STEM education in Guyana, I believe, has a far way to go. I remember being in high school and entering numerous science fairs and seeing the same projects recycled over and over winning the prizes every year. There was very little innovation, and very little encouragement to think bigger or to be inventive.
I loved competing in the science fairs, it was an amazing experience; a great way to bond with peers, and also a fun way to step out of the CSEC syllabus guidelines for Science and explore the topics in real life. But the projects themselves are most times unoriginal. Now, I don’t expect that every project submitted at a regional science fair would be ground-breaking research, but I just feel like it can become easy to hurriedly present a project simply because the school wants a project to be done.
And that there, I think, is the problem: treating STEM activities as an obligation. Children already see schooling as something they have to do, and because of that, some of the joy of learning is lost. Activities such as science fairs are supposed to encourage independent thinking, and are supposed to be a fun way for a child to voluntarily explore a topic of their interest. Whenever learning is driven by genuine interest, success — be it in the form of understanding a new topic, solving a difficult problem, or even passing a test — is much more meaningful, and comes a lot easier, as opposed to when one is told what to learn.
One of the reasons that I think STEM Guyana has done so well is because it, for the most part, attempts to create a non-pressure environment. The organisation hosts clubhouses, workshops, and even partners with STEM clubs within schools. Everyone, regardless of age or knowledge background, is encouraged to attend and try their hand at something; and I believe that, for young kids, this can be incredibly empowering.
When I was younger, and I thought about robotics, I had two main thoughts; the first being that robotics was incredibly complex and would probably take years of studying before I could produce something remotely interesting, and the second being that robotics sounds really, really cool. It was as though the entire field was abstract. Having programmes like the ones that STEM Guyana facilitates helps to make robotics and careers in the STEM field seem much more attainable to Guyanese children. They take away some of the mystery surrounding the fields, and allow children to work hands-on, developing robots and writing bits of code. This early exposure helps to foster a deeper and more appreciative understanding of STEM fields.
Whenever you tell people you’re in STEM fields, the automatic assumption is that you either study medicine or that you’re an engineer (most times mechanical or civil). Children can grow up feeling like these are their only options, and that is why I’m so glad that there are programmes that exist which show them otherwise.
Will every child who goes to a workshop or exhibition enter fields such as Computer Science or Robotics? No. But at least these events provide Guyanese children with the avenues to explore their interests, and to expand their ideas of what they think they can become.
