The first TISP workshop took place at Kyambogo University on 28th September 2018. It was organized by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) Uganda Sub-section in conjunction with the IEEE Kyambogo University Student Branch and Kyambogo University.
The workshop was attended by faculty members from Kyambogo University, Makerere University, Mbarara University of Science and Technology, IEEE student members and secondary school teachers from Uganda and Rwanda.
TISP is a professional development workshop aimed at pre-university educators to bring exciting hands-on engineering lessons to their classroom. The goals of the programme are to
- Empower section volunteers to collaborate with their local pre-university community;
- Promote applied inquiry based learning;
- Enhance the level of technical literacy of pre-university educators;
- Encourage pre-university students to pursue technical careers, including engineering;
- Increase the general level of technical literacy of pre-university students throughout their educational careers.
The workshop
Three lesson plans were selected from www.tryengineering.org and www.trycomputing.org. The lessons included Building your own robotic arm, series and parallel circuit and the tall tower challenge.
Participants were so amazed about the idea of inquiry based learning and the fact that working in groups does not only achieve results faster but also benefits from diverse range of ideas from the group members. The university faculty had the opportunity to interact with the pre-university teachers and also shared ideas on how science subjects in schools can be taught better. The pre-university teachers were happy about the workshop and promised to make necessary arrangements with the school administrators so that the TISP champions can be visiting their schools on a regular basis.
By: Roland Niwareeba(Head Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Branch Counselor- Kyambogo University IEEE Students Branch)