Bringing STEM Education to Refugees During a Pandemic

were thrust upon teachers and students. In this blog post, I’d like to share a different experience of a sudden move to online learning, far from a traditional school perspective. I hope that Phoenix Space’s shift to delivering digital learning can be useful or inspirational to others struggling with the new educational reality.

Beginning

Phoenix Space, a non-profit, started in 2019 to deliver high quality STEM education to young refugees in the Middle East. Young people in these regions are lacking regular schooling, have gaps in their learning from periods of displacement, or do not attend school for economic reasons. Our goal is to give “Skills for tomorrow, inspiration for a lifetime”. Through the inspirational topic of space science, we created a 30-lesson course, the Phoenix Space Program, which would teach skills in arithmetic, algebra, electronics, statistics and physics which would give students a boost in ability, confidence and curiosity. In February 2020 we collaborated with Small Projects Istanbul in Turkey to assemble classes which would be taught by local teachers. Each class would be split between a practical component (creating circuits, programming computers or microcontrollers, calculating trajectories), and a theoretical component.

Only weeks into the start of our courses, the pandemic forced schools to close and community centres were no longer open to receive our students. Faced with the choice of waiting until the pandemic receded, or trying out online learning, we decided to do the latter. In very little time, we had to strip out all the material that wasn’t fit for teaching online, and adapt the material that was left to stand alone. After our first, difficult, online lesson (a thunderstorm on my island in Hong Kong caused my internet connection to cut out, wiping irretrievably the whiteboard with all the carefully prepared diagrams!), the courses carried on. Our courses would be taught by Arabic instructors only, and we would keep them as low-tech as possible. What was important at that moment was that the students stayed in education - the fancier stuff could wait.