teaching Science instead

So as many of you know, I intended to volunteer as an English teacher in Luang Prabang. The short story is that the group with whom I was working was terribly disorganized and combined with Laos culture and politics the situation was a disaster. So I stopped doing that. At the same time I realized that personally I was ineffective at teaching English and that what I really wanted to be doing was hands-on stuff. To be doing science experiments...

As fate would have it, I met an expat running a non-profit library here in Luang Prabang, the website is: www.thelanguageproject.org. A neat lady. She started here five years ago on her own money and has built up several self-sustaining libraries in Luang Prabang. Its much more than a library now, it has expanded to include photography and computers and music. And now hands-on science...

She has basically given me free run at the library to set up experiments with the kids. Its been an experiment for me as well, to see what works and what doesn't. So we have tried a couple different things. An advertised event targeting all levels of science. A self-guided experiment. An experiment targeting university students. Every single day something happens that I could not have imagined the day before. I will be sharing some of these experiments, crazy stories and revelations in upcoming blogs...

The idea is to create hands-on, fun, science projects to help the kids learn and explore on their own. To inspire others to discover within themselves new levels of potential. I won't do presentations or lectures. To introduce the kids to new kinds of learning (i.e. not rote memorization) and hopefully nudge the teachers to try new kinds of learning.

I created a delicious account to keep track of websites out there with good ideas:
del.icio.us/brainbugscience. So if you have any ideas for projects or implementation I would love to hear it. Comments & criticisms too. Anything really.