Koh Yao Science Camp Description

Project:

To organize and conduct a Science Camp for students in the Koh Yao schools during the 2014 school break.  

Objectives:

  1. To provide young students an opportunity to get hands-on knowledge of basic principles of physics through experimentation, model building, and direct observation.
  2.  To develop the students’ curiosity and creative thought processes and to give them positive feedback on their experimental models and inventive thinking.
  3. To teach basic scientific principles and object visualization through use of the principles of “constructionism” (learning by doing) and the application of these principles to everyday life.
  4. To allow students at the Koh Yao schools to interact with graduate and professional engineers who are actually working in specific disciplines so that the students can learn what real-world work is like as a engineer.
  5. To encourage students to direct their high school educations toward science and mathematics with an eye toward attending a faculty of engineering or science at the university level.
  6. To train upper-level secondary students in the principles and practices of science education. Such participation should encourage these students to pursue a career in engineering or in science education.

Structure and Operations:

  1. Number of participating students: 40; Target student population: lower level secondary school students (grades 7, 8, and/or 9, ages 12-15) who will be attending the three “expanded opportunity” schools in Koh Yao.
  2. Duration: five days for the pre-camp and material preparation and five days for the Science Camp itself.
  3. Training staff: science teachers from the participating schools and graduate and professional Thai engineers; junior counselors: students entering their senior year at Aao Kapoh School and who have shown an aptitude for science and math.

Content Alternatives:

  1. Weights and mechanics: force multipliers / mechanical advantage:
  2. Fluid movements, gases, and hydraulics:
  3. [Possible, if time available] Electricity and magnetism: electrical circuits; coils, magnets and electro-magnetism

Background: Koh Yao is a district of Phangnga Province, located equidistant between Phuket Province and Krabi Province in Phangnga Bay in the Andaman Sea to the West of Thailand’s Southern Peninsula. The area is largely rural and the population is primarily engaged in fishing, rubber growing, and tourism. Despite the rapid growth in tourism in neighboring Phuket and Krabi, the two Koh Yao Islands and their populations have remained largely unaffected by it. Koh Yao District contains 14 school: one High School affiliated with the Office of Secondary Schooling and 13 elementary schools, of which three are “expanded opportunity schools.” Elementary schools contain kindergarten classes and primary grades one through 6. Expanded opportunity schools have elementary classes plus students in grades seven through nine. Once of these schools, Aao Kapoh School, has expanded its offerings to include grades ten through twelve, a full primary school and secondary school class offering.   (Budgeted in 2014 budget: $3,710.00)  

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