Back in Katale, children gathered at a neighborhood community center to try Project Weather Station, an Avenues Online (AON) learning module designed to put concepts in physics, math, and meteorology to real-world use by building DIY weather measurement instruments from common materials and using them to track the local weather.
Once introduced to the project by a mentor, the kids self-organized into teams and focused intensely on the online videos demonstrating the instruments’ construction and use. Jumping into the building phase, written instructions were largely lost in the excitement of creation, but working anemometers and wind vanes emerged from the flurry of snipping, gluing and packing of freshly excavated clay.
One instrument maker, a secondary school student, spoke enthusiastically about the project after she completed recording the first of her videos describing the instruments. She contrasted the hands-on approach favorably with the passive, lecture-based approach typical in her school.