Siyavula

Preparation

We’ve been pretty quiet the last couple of weeks, primarily because we’ve been working very hard to get ready for Science Festival Africa 2009. SciFest09 has finally arrived and so has Siyavula. All of the build-up deserves a number of blog entries but I wanted to focus on SciFest09 while it is fresh so you can keep up to date.

I would like to mention a great partners meeting we had after our final preparation workshop on Friday 20^th March. This is important because Siyavula is only a project through our partners. We’ve received great support and input from all of them and in the coming year we’ll need to collaborate more closely with all of them and have them collaborate more closely with each other.

We arrived in Grahamstown yesterday with our team, a collection of our partners who’ve come together to make this possible. Our SciFest09 teams consists of:

• Quinton Davis (Edunova)
• Ziphelele Mdlalo (Edunova)
• Makhosazana Klaas (Edunova)
• Wilbur Britz (active teacher & Edunova)
• William Page (Khanya)
• René Toerien (content author and editor)
• Lisa Petrides (ISKME)
• Cynthia Jimes (ISKME)

Day 1 – The Stall
The stall required a little bit of setup in the morning. We have a table with 3 computers for viewing the site, taking the baseline survey online and viewing the content. One ethernet cable instead of the three we required resulted in the acquisition of a hub and some ethernet cables. We’re now fully functional and had a very good day considering it was a quiet first day for the festival.

Highlights of the day included:

• First up was a visit from officials from the Eastern Cape Department of Education responsible for science and maths teacher development
• A request from Independent Education for an article
• A number of the PGCE class from Rhodes University (pre-service teachers for those unfamiliar with the PGCE)
• Caryn McNamara popped by and we’re going to try to organise:
  • a special, extra training session on Monday night for the PGCE students and the Rhodes staff associated with the course
  • an additional session on Tuesday for a group of teachers that have been going through a computer literacy programme Rhodes is running
• a selection of teachers, curriculum advisors, parents and other exhibitors

On the whole, we are very happy with the first day at the stall.

Day 1 – The Workshop
We started the day with a lab of twenty laptops, we ended with twenty internet-enabled machines. It may not sound like much of an achievement but every password, account name etc. was a treasure hunt of its own. The training manuals also arrived in time for the first workshop. We made steady progress throughout the day and the workshop went off without a hitch.

During all the technical hitches the training team managed to network with the museum curator and win her over to our work, conduct an interview with SciQ which included a run through of the site and maintain good humour.

The highlight from the training team was the undisguised excitement from the teachers who participated in the workshop.

The feedback from the teachers that participated was really good. The ideas of openness and sharing resonated and they spoke of the potential of the project without our prompting. I didn’t participate in the workshop myself so we’ll have to get a blog post up from someone else regarding them right away.

Thats my brief round-up of Day 1. Given that everything is now working and tomorrow should be a busier day at the festival I’m looking forward to much more to report.