Since PEN’s founding, more than 3,500 Ghanaian teachers have gone through the organization’s training workshops. Those efforts culminated in the Practical Education Network (PEN), an organization that helps teachers develop hands-on projects for students using low-cost and readily available materials. The experience set Beem, who earned her doctorate in 2015, on a mission to share the power of hands-on learning with ever-larger groups of children. I have the ability to create the solutions I need in my life.’” If I don't have electricity, I can find a way of generating it. “It showed that just a little bit of exposure to hands-on learning can have a really deep impact on the way students see themselves and what they believe they are capable of,” Beem says. The project gave the students a newfound confidence. Within a few days, the bucket was the centerpiece of a small wind turbine that could generate electricity. To the students’ surprise, the answer was yes.īeem led the students through the process of cutting the bucket in half, attaching the pieces to a vertical axis so that they spun in the wind, and using magnets and wires taken from scraps to harvest energy from the motion. Ignoring the laughter of his peers, he asked if it could be useful for anything. “Because the students felt sort of ashamed to not have anything they felt they could bring to the table.”Įventually, a boy came forward with a plastic bucket. “As soon as I mentioned materials, the atmosphere in the room changed,” Beem says. Hoping to narrow things down a bit, she asked what kinds of materials they had to work with. “They said, ‘Anything, whatever you want,’” Beem recalls. She began by asking a group of high school students what they wanted to work on. In the summer of 2011, MIT PhD student Heather Beem travelled to a rural region of Ghana to try engaging students from low-resource schools in hands-on learning projects.
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