Click here to receive our detailed Ortinola Prospectus PDF.
Click here to receive our detailed Ortinola Prospectus PDF.
Heather holds a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During her time in graduate school and at D-Lab, she developed a passion for STEM education and indigenous innovation. At D-Lab, she co-founded and co-instructed D-Lab: Education in addition to mentoring students from other D-Lab classes.
While at MIT, she began developing the Practical Education Network (PEN) with a team of fellow students and others. They won numerous competitions including the MIT Sloan Africa Innovate Business Plan Competition (2015), IEEE/IBM SmarterPlanet Challenge, 1st Place Curriculum (2012), and the MIT Global Challenge/IDEAS Competition (2011).
Since graduating in 2015, Heather has been leading PEN in their pursuit of scaling experiential learning in resource-limited settings. She has worked with hundreds of students and teachers from Boston to Ghana to Peru.
The COVID-19 pandemic has upended children's lives in unprecedented ways. Hundreds of millions of children are spending months away from their classrooms, and for the majority of students in West Africa, no school means no learning. According to UNICEF, the longer that children (especially the vulnerable ones) stay away from school, the less likely they are to return. It is critical to provide students alternative ways to learn and rebuild their routine.
After recording the first two cases of COVID-19 in March, the Government of Ghana closed all schools. We project that late 2020/early 2021 is when schools will re-open and be fully operational again. An estimated 5-8 million Ghanaian students are completely devoid of structured learning opportunities. The existing gaps in quality education between West Africa and the developed world are being exacerbated through this crisis and threaten to have ripple effects on the region's ability to develop in years to come.
PEN is raising $300,000 in emergency funding to roll out a suite of digital STEM educational content for students and teachers in Ghana. We are leveraging an extensive set of curriculum-aligned, practical STEM activities (1,000+) and a strong network of teachers (3,000+) to rapidly translate existing content and deploy at scale. This will not only ensure that learning continues, but it will restore hope for students and purpose for teachers, whilst enabling the government to concentrate on COVID-19 mitigation efforts. Once schools re-open, these activities will be blended with PEN's existing in-person work, so as to employ improved modes of disseminating STEM education across the continent.
1. Bringing STEM to Homes through radio, videos, animations, graphical instructions, and booklets to enable students to cover the sequence of science content that they would have been covering in school, and in a hands-on manner. All PEN content leverages simple materials, including those that can be found in a typical Ghanaian home. We also include tips for parents to support their children and engage with them in carrying out the activities;
2. Bringing STEM to Teachers through online training via Zoom. Our network of 3,000+ teachers is on standby, eager to receive ideas for how they can continue reaching their students with hands-on STEM content. They will be trained in digital literacy and given templates for engaging their students on various channels (WhatsApp, radio, etc. depending on location);
3. Simplifying STEM through PEN's Resource Manuals, which contain thousands of hands-on activities using local materials and which are aligned to the national curriculum. These manuals will be sent first to teachers in the rural communities.
Practical Education Network (PEN) equips West African STEM teachers to employ inquiry-based pedagogies in their classrooms, utilizing locally available materials. PEN has developed thousands of hands-on STEM activities that leverage low-cost and readily available materials. These were designed with Ghanaian teachers, and we are now working towards sharing these widely with teachers and parents globally, as they seek meaningful modes of engaging students while stuck at home during the COVID-19 crisis. PEN was born at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), while the founder was pursuing her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering.
Since 2014, we have trained 3,000+ STEM teachers on our practical pedagogical approach to STEM, impacted over 590,000 students and equipped 100 teachers to attain the status of PEN Trainer. This is accomplished through our holistic teacher training program, where teachers learn, design, and share MIT-style, hands-on activities. The activities are fully aligned to the national curricula and created from low-cost, locally available materials.
PEN's activities have been recognized globally, and achieved successes locally. Notably is the call from educational policy makers in Ghana for PEN to participate in the revision of national curriculum for basic schools. Spearheaded by National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NaCCA), PEN infused portions of its hands-on content into Ghana's new primary and junior high school national science curricula.
A controlled study conducted to ascertain the impact of PEN's approach to STEM on students and teachers in the Ghanaian Junior High School classroom by Michigan Technological University in the 2017/2018 academic year revealed that our approach had a beneficial impact on students' classroom environment, attitudes towards science, and improved outcomes in standardized test scores. Teachers trained through the study were found to be very comfortable with setup of materials and confident in offering hands-on delivery using our method. Comparing outcomes between the experimental and control schools' performance on the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE), pupils whose teachers had PEN's hands-on STEM training increased their performance by 28.78%, which is a 97% higher improvement than those who had no PEN training (14.6%). The former group also reported their attitudes towards science improving 141% more than the latter group, over the course of the academic year.
http://www.practicaleducationnetwork.com/
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For gifts by check: Address your check to Impact Bridges Group, write Practical Education Network Project in the memo section of the check, and send it to Impact Bridges Group, 5434 Driscoll Drive. Manotick, ON, K4M 1E3
Gifts by wire transfer or to contribute other types of property: Email Impact Bridges Group at: info@impactbridgesgroup.com or phone (416) 558 1954.
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