Many schools in Armenia don’t have any scientific laboratories or even instrumentation to demonstrate simple experiments from physics or chemistry textbooks. On the other hand, after Soviet Union, not all departments of universities have opportunity to provide practical and experimental lessons to show students the science in real life. As a result many middle and high school students do not have any experience with applied part of the science in general. These gaps make them doubt the importance of science and many become ignorant.
Yerevan Young Minds is also concerned by this problem and is trying to come up with a solution. Members of Yerevan Young Minds plan to make a bridge between schools and universities and try to fill educational gaps within them.
Our awesome idea is to create new handmade scientific tool kits with the help of students for school pupils who don’t have access to any kind of laboratories. Firstly, students will learn by creating new tool kits. Additionally, they will have opportunity to fill gap of experiments and practical lessons in universities. Secondly, pupils will have chance to have their own school kits for learning experiments from textbooks. One of the main important things is that they can make little demonstrations themselves even without expensive instrumentation.
Our tool-kits will be accompanied with “How to Use” brochures which will have additional explanation of the Physics behind the experiments. This would be done by students as an additional challenge: explaining experiments in simplest and very understandable way for kids.
For implementing the idea, three experimental tool-kits have been carefully chosen. They will be distributed among ten schools from different villages with the help of "Teach for Armenia" organization or during our school visits in villages. Members of Yerevan Young Minds will also visit schools and make additional demonstrations for experiments by peer teaching method.