Africa has made great strides in recent years, improving access to education, and boosting student retention. While progress has been made, we need to seize the opportunities and tackle the challenges presented by our growing youth population.
One of the challenges is ensuring equitable and sustainable development across the continent. This will require sufficient investment in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields to nurture individuals into critical thinkers and problem solvers.
However, according to the African Development Bank, less than 25 per cent of African higher education students pursue a career in STEM. The continent struggles to provide quality STEM education at scale, a problem exacerbated by an insufficient number of qualified teachers. The continent will need up to 17 million additional teachers to achieve universal primary and secondary education by 2030.
STEM teachers who are taking on the task of educating Africa's youth face great challenges such as inadequate teaching, training and learning resources which prevent them from doing the job well. While reports suggest that some countries are seeing improvements in students' STEM achievement and the continent has taken steps to develop a comprehensive policy framework for STEM education, the sheer diversity across African education systems makes sharing best practices difficult.
For example, East Africa has different education systems, with learners spending between 16 years (South Sudan and Rwanda) and 20 years (Burundi) from pre-primary to university education. By supporting locally rooted teachers with the resources to succeed, such as innovative, scalable teaching solutions, the region can be better positioned to improve accessibility and empower students to pursue STEM education.
As a former teacher who has taught both under-resourced and privileged contexts, I've seen first-hand the effect of investment in education. For perspective, I was once the only math and physics teacher in a high school with over 600 students.
It was impossible for me to teach all my lessons, leading me to necessarily condense material or even skip classes in cases where I was double-booked for courses in the same hour.
Compare this with a position I held later in my career when I was responsible for only 30 students and worked in an environment where my colleagues and I could exchange ideas and support one another in improving our practice.
Speaking in general terms, however, regardless of teacher workload, schools across Africa often lack laboratory equipment and technology. Students typically learn topics like electricity without ever handling wires, light bulbs, or batteries.
When I had limited resources, I would explain how to make the bulb brighter and relate the motion of the electrons in an electric circuit. However, my students would remember the explanation without understanding the principles of electricity.
The outcome under these limitations is that students end up perceiving physics as a theoretical subject which is often too abstract to comprehend, leading students to drop future studies in STEM fields. Such decisions have implications on students' access and participation in STEM courses at tertiary institutions, in turn impacting their ability to pursue STEM-related jobs in the future.
I underwent a paradigm shift in my teaching when I found resources like PhET Interactive Simulations, a suite of research-based interactive computer simulations for teaching and learning that were originally developed by 2020 Yidan Prize for Education Research Laureate and 2001 Nobel Laureate in Physics Carl Wieman.
PhET provides open-ended, gamelike simulations with an intuitive interface and minimal text, making it appropriate for a variety of settings. The simulations include expert visual models that make the invisible visible and provide multiple representations, enabling students to engage in scientist-like exploration and real-world connections.
Simulations helped me move away from textbook-based, theoretical instruction, and help students engage digitally, on their devices or projected on a wall in class. I was able to ask students to use the simulations to find out what components are necessary to create a lit bulb in a circuit, and to explore how bulb brightness was related to electron motion-something that is easy to see in the simulation.
These kinds of activities helped my students create their own simulated circuits and, quickly learn the principles of electricity during the process. I also found that these kinds of resources helped change norms in my own classroom, supporting students to be inquirers and generators of their own knowledge, sparking their interest and inspiring them to consider careers in STEM.
I have now moved on from my role as a classroom teacher to support others, and I happen to be doing that as the Africa Lead for PhET Interactive Simulations. As part of this work, I believe that Africa has the potential to leverage existing open education resources, like PhET simulations, along with local experts-teachers themselves-who understand what works best for learners to scale quality STEM education in Africa.
Supported by the Yidan Prize Foundation, the PhET team are making this a reality through the PhET Fellowship, a program to build local capacity to deliver quality STEM education. To date, we have identified 15 African teacher leaders who will promote the use of PhET simulations in school networks across the continent, with the goal to change not only what teachers are teaching but how.
Through innovative approaches to learning, we will be better positioned to harness resources, accelerate systemic change, and innovate for a brighter future in Africa. Through this work, we hope to contribute to the paradigm shift in education that teachers and other experts have called for to meet the region's economic needs, boosting young people's skills and competitiveness across Africa and beyond.
The writer, Zachariah Mbasu is the Africa Lead at PhET Interactive Simulations.
