2011 Volunteer Lecturer Program

The Volunteer Lecturer Program (VLP) that is sponsored by the Developing Countries Strategy Group of the International Mathematics Union (IMU) , in cooperation with International Center for Pure and Applied Mathematics (CIMPA) and the U.S. National Committee for Mathematics. As a part of this program, I was able to participate in the Volunteer Lecturer Program at The Nelson Mandela African Institute of Science and Technology, Arusha (NM AIST-Arusha) from Aug 8, 2011 to Sept 2, 2011. More details about my participation can be found at NM AIST-Arusha .

(Picture with the NM AIST-Arusha Vice Chancellor Prof. Burton LM Mwamila and of NM AIST-Arusha (to my left) and Prof. Leif Abrahamsson Mathematics Programme Director, International Science Programme (to my right) along with visiting delegates from the East African University Mathematics Programme, members form the Government of South Korea and faculty from NM AIST-Arusha.)
 

Research Interactions

I also had the opportunity to visit several leading scientists and directors of prominent programs who visited NM AIST-Arusha to build partnerships. These included Prof. Leif Abrahamsson, Mathematics Program Director International Science Programme , Peter Singer, Chief Executive Officer, Grand Challenges Canada along with delegates from the African Capacity Building Foundation as well as members form the East African Universities Mathematics Programme . I was invited to make a presentation to these delegates on “Applications of Mathematics to Science and Engineering”.

I also had the opportunity to interact with faculty on a regular basis from all various schools and departments at NM AIST-Arusha including Mathematics, Computational and Communcation Science and Engineering; Life Sciences and Bioengineering; Materials Science and Engineering and; Water Resources and Environmental Science and Engineering. Having directed students on a variety of projects at all levels in the last decade on these areas, I was able to share my work with them and discuss potential collaborations that we can build from both our experise. In this regard, I was able to help out creating proposals and hope to engage in interdisciplinary collabortive research opportunities in the near future.

K-12 Outreach Activities

During my VLP, I was able to visit three secondary (high schools) that included the Orkeeswa Secondary School, Maasai Girls School and Ilboru Secondary School and a Maasai Primary School to give lectures to over 700 students. I was very happy to have impacted so many of the next generation African Scientists by engaging them on problem solving and critical thinking. The Maasai Girls School that I visited and lectured at is a school for Maasai girls who are often deprived of schooling in a male-dominated society and it was nice to learn that President Bush had visited the same school during his trip to Arusha, Tanzania in Feb 2008.

I am hoping to help these school set up afterschool mathematics clubs and connect them with faculty at NM AIST-Arusha to constantly motivate them to pursue mathematics, science and engineering. Also, I had an opportunity to share with the highschool teachers about possible resources that they can use to motivate the students to think of careers in STEM.

Classroom Videos

Attached below are classroom engagement with students captured for the handshake problem (which generated a rich discussion of Guass Formula, Permuations and Combinations, Arithmetic progression, Finite Differences, Geometric interpretation via graph theory ideas, Creating multiple representation for the solutions strategies and connecting them etc. and the pizza topping selection problem (which introduced permuations and combinations and connected to Pascals Triangle). The focus in the discussion on enhancing their habits of mind while solving problems including abstracting from simple problems, doing and undoing, become efficienct in obtaining solutions and finally connecting the multiple representations. I also had a chance to visit the math club of one of the schools and worked with students to encourage them to pursue mathematics as a foundation for STEM to research and solve bigger real-world problems including disease dynamics, biomathematics, applications in defense etc. I am confident many of these young students are going to contribute to the big changes in their continent one day through STEM! Enjoy some of the videos below (click on the titles).

• Handshake : Engaging the students in active learning exercise to figure out the number of distinct handshakes.
• Handshake : Student describing the connection to Arithmetic Progression Formulas
• Handshake : Making the connections and the importance of multiple respresentations in problem solving
• Pizza Toppings : Discussion on how to organize data to be able to abstract from simple cases. In particular, helping the students discover the importance of the Pascal’s triangle and its connection to the number of toppings on a Pizza. Also, this led to rich discussions on Binomial Theorem and powers of two.
• Mathclub : This gave me an opportunity to motivate the students to appreciate the applications of mathematics and STEM to real-world problems. This need to promote the awareness of mathematics and applications is very essential and students appreciated the fact that mathematics can be used to solve many real-world problems which they did not realize at first!