Wow, only now just writing about Monday, day 6 of the workshop. It has been one crazy week and a half…!
During the first week of the workshop, my modules had been pretty well fleshed out beforehand. But as week 2 approached, time to focus on my two day 6 modules (microscopy and EECS) was nowhere to be found and day 6 loomed closer and closer. So, after a big work day (erm.. night) by the whole team on Sunday, day 6 was ready to go.
As the students trickled back into week 2 of the workshop, we welcomed them with some stunning microscope images on the screen. Throughout our workshop, we’ve tried to include recurring themes that would tie concepts together for the students. My microscope module of the morning was supposed to relate back to bacteria day of the week before. My hope with these 2 workshops was that by making biology more visible (such as making beautiful paintings out of microscopic bacteria and looking at tiny things with a microscope), it would be more engaging for the students to learn about biology.
The day began by introducing some basic microscopy words in English, like zoom, focus, and slide. While going through the intro words (making sure the students were copying them down in their notebook), I broke up the lecture style with several small table discussion questions, like… how do microscopes work? How do lenses bend light? We’ve realized over the course of the workshop that these types of small discussions are so useful for keeping the kids engaged, having them more comfortable to voice their thoughts (especially if they struggle in English or Korean), and gives us useful feedback on their understanding. To show students the power of microscopes, I displayed a video showing very intricate images of different types of snowflakes, another video showing an immune cell attacking cancer, and another showing the development of a worm from a single cell! At these, one student excitedly exclaimed, “Wow, I can see my life!”
After going through the parts and technical details of the microscopes, we moved on to a game to familiarize the students with actually using them! I put a zoomed in microscope image on the screen, passed out some money to the kids (a dollar bill, a 1000 won bill, and a quarter), and had them race to try to match the image on their own microscope. George Washington was super excited to see his face all over American money. For one student who spent some of her childhood in North Korea, seeing the American coins reminded her of how she (and many other North Koreans) would make necklaces out of American coins that they would find. Sarah was working with Kathy and James at one table, and they were cracking up the whole time, racing through each image and finding it very fast (Sarah is soo good at making sure the kids are having fun, even when there is a language barrier).
After everyone had been familiarized with the microscope, we moved on to looking at pre-prepared microscope slides, which displayed things from onion cells and wasp wings to human blood smears and slices of dog muscles. After looking through a bunch of slides each student picked one to draw an accurate biological drawing of. One student, Kathy, drew a super simple 2 lines on her paper… I thought she was being lazy but turns out I had accidentally given her a defective slide and she was duplicating it exactly as is! The point of this activity was to continue familiarizing the kids with microscopes and practice careful observation of their specimens, but also to have them practice English! I had a few students present to the class about what they had drawn. Some of the students really appreciate chances like these to practice English.
After a few English presentations, we moved on to the next activity: taking a sample of our own cells to look at under the microscope. Everyone used a sterile pipette to take a swab of their cheek cells and wipe them on a slide, along with a dot of methylene blue dye (wearing gloves to avoid turning their skin a strange color), and carefully covered the concoction with a coverslip. It was a little bit difficult for some people to see their cells, but after some adjustments, we were able to get some really nice pictures!
Next, I passed back everyone’s bacteria plates from the week before. It was really fun to see everyone’s bacteria painting come to life and to compare which areas of the room had more or less bacteria. The heater and the bathroom seat had clearly abundant microbial communities (yuck). The mouth/teeth samples had a lot of really tiny colonies while the nose samples (yes, up the nostril) had a few larger, gross looking colonies. Most everyone’s hand sanitized hand had less bacteria than before cleansing, but some people apparently need some work on their sanitizing technique.
The students tried to look at their bacteria under the microscope and could see the colorful colonies up close (the microscopes we had aren’t powerful enough to really see individual bacteria, although that would have been super cool). I had planned a whole image processing activity to show the students that they could use computer software to count the number of bacteria colonies on their plates, but we ended up not having time! It is really hard to gauge how long activities will take… but a general theme of our team is that we always over prepare… oof.
After microscopes, we headed to malatang… again. Malatang has become a meme since all the students who had lived in China for some time love it but the spice level and numbing feeling it induces kind of murdered Lulu and I on day 1. Afterwards, we returned to the school to begin the Arduino/EECS module.
Sarah and I had stayed up super late the night before trying to finish Arduino day (and as Sarah said herself, if she’s not sleeping… the situation is serious). Unfortunately, the late night nature of the module made it not as well thought out as some of the others. Trying to take the students feedback (from our daily checkout meetings) of including more English words, we didn’t realize that we had included wayy too many English words until we were halfway through them and were kind of overloading the kids. Looking back, there is a lot that Sarah and I would change about this module setup… but at least we’ve learned a lot about what is and isn’t effective! We did try to break up the words with some questions (about what has more or less resistance, what uses electricity, etc), but overall, we didn’t need to include so much vocab!
On the bright side, our hands on activity of having the students light up LEDs by building circuits using wires, resistors, and Arduinos was a big hit. The students learned about breadboards and how to create circuits and a lot of them even decided to do Arduino work as their final project! We had a whole nother activity planned (an introduction to soldering and more circuitry) but we ran out of time and had to push it to another day… always happens 😦
After the workshop, we split off to get things done. Sarah and I headed over to a local flower shop to try to find seeds. Our student George Washington is a part of the cubes in space team and wanted to send seeds of both the South and North Korea national flowers into space to 1) have symbolic meaning of unity and 2) see how the change in pressure and UV radiation (etc) affects the seeds ability to grow when they return to Earth. Lulu and Sheila headed to Dongdaemun chemical stores to turn the insanely enormous bag of the corrosive, dangerous NaOH that we had obliviously acquired the week before (why was it so easy to get, is the real question) for a tiny bag with a reasonable amount of NaOH (we needed less than a gram, lol). Sarah and my flower quest failed but the shop directed us to a flower nursery in Dongdaemun, so we informed Sheila and Lulu to pick up the seeds while they were already there! Perfect.
After returning to the Airbnb, it was grind time for the next day… Crime Day. Sheila and I napped on and off while Lulu and Sarah starting brainstorming riddles to create an escape room like situation for the kids (set to the theme of a missing frog prince… since we were going to dissect frogs..). More details on this in the Crime Day post, soon to come.
We went out to grab a quick dinner of 부대 찌게 (Budae-jjigae), a spicy sausage stew (with ham, spam, sausage, noodles, etc) that rose about from mixing together all the smuggled left overs from US army bases after the Korean War. Afterwards, it was all hands on deck from crime day. Lulu and Sheila practiced using chemicals to make fake blood and creating a Luminol spray to make the blood glow in the dark (which unfortunately didn’t work due to unknown reasons even after they tried so many times and Sheila had to stop Lulu from continuing to handle NaOH at 2am). Sarah kept working on the riddles and cut out clothing garment props as a part of the story line. I coded up a little quiz game that would act as one of the levels in the escape room. After many giggles and a few hours later, crime day was ready to go!
GTL Korea 2020 