The past few days have been a whirlwind.
As the member of the group with the most negligible Korean or Chinese skills (my Korean is essentially limited to hello, goodbye, excuse me, and “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Korean”) I’ve quickly occupied the role of the clueless English speaker. The words 한국말 못해요 (the most important words I have learned) have come out of my mouth so many times in the past 3 days as kids spew lightning fast Korean at me. Communication with the students was very difficult at first, especially since there is quite a wide range of English ability. Some students have enough English to ask me about my dreams for the future and about my life in America, while some respond to English solely in “Yes”, “No”, “I’m fine thank you”, giggles, or blank stares.
Yet, my language barrier with the students has proved useful in several aspects. By day 2, I realized that I should sit at a table with students who had more english experience. During our chemistry model, I was able to communicate with the students and help answer their technical questions about reaction catalysts, free energy, and the shape of hydrogen peroxide (our students are SO smart). My inability to switch to Korean or Chinese really forced the students to practice their English, and they had a lot of fun doing so. As we become closer to the students, they are much more willing to speak English and take risks. Many of the kids have big dreams (one wants to be an electrical engineer, one a drone ocean researcher, another the president of a United Korea) and it’s so rewarding to help fuel their drive to learn science and English.
On the morning of Day 3, we rolled out of the Airbnb with the classic 2 slices of toast, several drones in our backpacks, and a suitcase carrying a 3D printer. We said hello to the ladies on the corner that we see everyday (they are always confused why we are lugging random stuff up their hill).
My aeroastro lesson of the morning was the first time I would be leading a (majority English taught) module, and I was slightly doubtful of my ability to convey some tricky concepts through our language barrier. When I began the lesson, though, my review of physics concepts seemed to make the students alert. Sheila, Sarah, and Lulu were straight up ballers at translating to kids who weren’t understanding, writing Korean and Chinese on small wipe boards at each table. The students really seem to like classes that review concepts in English that they have been previously exposed to in Korean, and some of the students that were more shy on previous days had fun with an activity to measure their walking velocity.
We next moved on to a hands on activity (gotta have these so that they don’t fall asleep on the toasty heated floors). I instructed the kids to make paper bag masks to demonstrate the concept of lift. A lot of the students are really artsy, and so they had fun making the masks look very pretty. They figured out that blowing fast air over the paper tongue causes the tongue to rise. Our next question was, why?
So, we pulled out a giant tub of water and some cups. I got my elbows wet in the bucket and showed that you can actually pour air! So, air is a fluid! We moved onto the concept of air pressure and got out some balloons, straws, and hairdryers. I asked the kids some questions about which way a balloon would move if you blow air at a certain angle. They got super into it (they’re pretty competitive) and cheered loudly when the balloons moved in toward a fast stream of air flowing beside it… #bernoullisprinciple.
We wrapped the whole lesson up with the kids building remote controlled drones, connecting the motors, wires, propellers etc. Straight up chaos ensued as drones were whizzing around the room, smashing into things, and (often) failing to work properly lol yikes (but these kids were so persistent, they really kept trying to fly those drones even when their remote control kept connecting to someone else’s drone). One student, Cindy, literally sat for like 30 minutes during lunch trying to get her drone to fly again after it unexpectedly stopped working. Everyone tried to navigate the difficult to control drones through a hula hoop… without success D: Overall, the kids all said it was a lot of fun despite the chaos.
In the afternoon, Sheila started spitting facts about 3D printing. She introduced the concept of prototyping and we had the students build something that could fly (connecting back to our aerospace module) out of clay (since clay is easier and more reversible than building the flying machine with no prototype). The students were really into it and we had some great displays of artwork including a chicken head, a very detailed airplane, a pterodactyl, and Superman (thank you Sarah). We had the students discuss their works in English and share with the rest of the class. After pointing out that clay takes a while to work with, we went down to the computer room and started CADing! At first TinkerCad was a bit tough to get the hang of, but by the end of the module had a lot of pretty intricate designs ready to be 3D printed. One student, James, was having a lot of trouble grasping the 3D representation and orienting himself spatially on the computer, but he kept working at it and eventually made a created a whole skeleton that we 3D printed for him!
After the workshop, the grind didn’t stop. After a dinner of chicken in a pan with some cute heart shaped rice we made yet another Deiso stop for materials and sat down in a cafe to get ready for Day 4! My bacteria palettes had grown by now, the strawberries were bought, and pretty soon we were ready for another day of learning.
GTL Korea 2020 