Last Sunday may well have offered a seminal moment in the contemporary history of our formal education system. Interestingly, it was provided largely by an only now emerging non-governmental organization that has set young minds racing across the country.
Sunday’s STEM Guyana/Tullow Oil Third Annual Robotics Exhibition at the Arthur Chung Convention Centre served up a pointed lesson in how to stir positive passions in children, how to effectively mobilize from the various corners of our vast country, even some of the remotest ones and how, moreover, to generate within them a sense that they are an integral part of a game-changing pursuit, no less, insofar as the development of our country is concerned.
Sunday’s event, it should be noted, emerged against the backdrop of issues within our schools which, these days, present an imposing challenge to an education system that is, in truth, fragile in many respects. Deviant behaviour arising out of the sheer rebelliousness of youth continues to pose challenges to the very mission of education delivery.
Contextually, what was perhaps most significant about Sunday was the fact that the children and young adults had assembled at the Convention Centre in decidedly impressive numbers from most corners of the country and significantly without the benefit of the compulsory mobilization usually associated with Education Month events, for example…and that parents, customarily too preoccupied with their own pursuits to be mindful of their children’s extra curricula goings-on, were in tow, in significant numbers too.
For several hours on Sunday, this spontaneous gathering created an altogether unrehearsed space that offered equal measures of learning and fun in a manner that is far from commonplace in Guyana.
These days, the discipline of STEM no longer languishes in the realm of the extra-curricular. It is being dragged more towards the centre of the country’s gradual educational offering and, according to Karen Abrams, STEM Guyana’s CEO, herself a sort of ‘energizer bunny,’ “the journey is still a work in progress.”
The acronym derives from the conventional disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. As a single structured pursuit its importance reposes in the fact that, collectively, the disciplines comprising the acronym are critical to enormous chunks of our lives and where we go from here. STEM provides hands-on and minds-on lessons which have already assumed a compelling global relevance and which Guyana cannot afford to ignore.
Last Sunday’s STEM Guyana Robotics Exhibition, was offered against the backdrop of the organization’s own earlier acquired credentials deriving from the remarkable accomplishments of its near novice ‘national teams’ at two major international robotics events, first, in Washington in 2017 and in Dubai earlier this year. All of this had begun with an earlier mission to Guyana by the Atlanta-based Abrams who acknowledges what she says has been “the considerable contribution” of First Lady Sandra Granger and a handful of public and private sector officials to the cause of getting STEM Guyana to what and where it is today.
At the Convention Centre on Sunday there might even have been something surreal about groups of Guyanese, parents and children, from communities as physically and socially distant from each other as Matthews Ridge and Greenwich Park, meeting in the same space with the identical mission. They had all come together, children, young adults and parents, to share the experience of demonstrating the proficiency of robots that they had created in their various Clubs across the country.
The sense of novelty aside, STEM-Guyana succeeded in lifting its Robotics show from the level of just a learning environment to an animated space in which the robots that had been created by the various Clubs were competing against each other in crowd-pleasing pursuits that elicited periodic animated applause from those who watched the displays in amazement.
Before STEM Guyana, the emergence of STEM as a dimension to the schools’ curriculum in developed countries might have, for the time being at least, passed quietly, here in Guyana. It might have been perceived as a pursuit which, even if worthwhile, had come before its time; and our formal education system may well have set it aside as “something for the future,” a discipline that “will grow in time” and one which “requires the volume of resources that are unaffordable at this juncture.” STEM Guyana has ‘junked’ that notion and afforded our education system more than just something to think about. After Washington, Dubai and the Arthur Chung Convention Centre on Sunday our formal education system cannot remain lukewarm about the importance of creating a structured STEM curriculum, adding a new and decidedly relevant dimension to our education system…not after the waves that STEM Guyana has been making and certainly not after Sunday’s showing at the Convention Centre.
As an object lesson to our wider education system STEM Guyana has thumbed its nose at the clichés that direct us to ‘stand in line’ and ‘wait our turn.’ Having created with wafer thin resources STEM Clubs across the country whose real success has been their infusion of impressive levels of both competence and enthusiasm within their members in a discipline, which, hitherto, was largely unknown to Guyana, STEM Guyana has thrown down a challenge to our mainstream education system which it cannot back away from.
For the STEM Club members at the Arthur Chung Convention Centre on Sunday it was not just the pride in knowing that they now ‘own’ something worthwhile to show off to a larger audience; beyond that, it was their acute awareness that what STEM Guyana has done is to enhance their self-esteem by creating in them an awareness that they dwell in the same technological space as children from far more advanced countries. Even more importantly, their experience has elevated their perceptions of themselves and allowed them to contextualize education and its significance beyond what now obtains in the contemporary education system.
So that it is not just a question of what we learn and how we learn but whether, as a nation, we are prepared to confront the challenge of ‘jumping out of our crease,’ (as the cricketing axiom goes) and daring ourselves to ‘take on’ the challenges that are thrown at us without bothering to be restrained by the notion that we are not quite ready to go there yet.
