Cape Coast Craziness

Location: Cape Coast University

Audience: 200+ students

Timings: sunset - 9.30 ish

Programme: Videos, interactive quiz, star gazing

Skies: Clear!

Cape Coast University ended up being a hastily prepared event. The student in charge of organising the evening decided to deputise to someone else 3 hours in advance so we arrived at CC with no audience, a common room to set up in (where the students were relaxing in front of films already), and no discernable physics society presence. 

Obviously the best way to counter this was to migrate to the amphitheatre outside in the middle of the halls (a cross between an American jail and a London estate with the same amount of heckling) and set up the projector on a wall, go round with a megaphone and play dodgy highlife/ crank music at full blast through the magical appearance of some HUGE speakers. It did the trick as we played a galaxy video and by the end of 10 minutes there were more than 200 students. 

It was raucous and lively as we asked lots of questions and they started getting into it by throwing out answers and equally perplexing questions. For me the highlight came when I was using Stellarium (Google it - it's free software that shows you the sky at night and you can set the location, time and direction) and I pointed out on the screen where Mars was and then pointed to it in the sky and the place almost erupted! It was like Essien had scored the winner in the World Cup for the Black Stars. It was quite a mind shift to discover that the students hadn't connected one of our planets with the red circle in the night sky (if you haven't seen it then defintely have a look)!

We then headed out to view the stars and the Moon on the athletic field (where coincidentally there were prayer meetings going on and lots of people speaking in tongues and dancing around...very bizarre!! The irony of science and religion colliding was not lost on us). We decided not to leave the telescope with the students this time as the support and infrastructure was not in place to make use of it.

As it turned out, we've donated the telescope and two pairs of binoculars instead to the new science centre at Ada, which was opened today by Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell (President of the UK Institute of Physics). They are training science teachers and established a large resource centre to offer astronomy GCSE so it seemed a much better choice for now. 

Finally, last weekend we also tried to do a similar talk at the University of Legon outside Accra but it fell through at the last minute due to power (lack of), technicians (too tired to help) and generators (too expensive to hire) not to mention a lack of audience. Instead Emmanuel (who works at the planetarium and is a student at Legon) stood outside the halls encouraging students to come and look at the stars and we set up the telescopes for them to look through. This turned out to be a grand method and we actually reached well over a hundred students and were able to have lots of exciting discussions about life on other planets etc, which we wouldn't have been able to have otherwise. 

It was a busy few days, but I feel we've achieved one of our aims of stimulating the students to become interested and encouraging the professors to start astronomy degrees. The next stage is to engage younger students who wish to study science and hope that the infrastructure is there by the time they reach university age. There's a lot we can say about STEM skills being underrated by the younger generation in Ghana - the same problems as in the UK but the country starts needing to train more of it's own if it doesn't want to rely on foreigners coming in to run, for example, the huge oil fields they've found offshore. 

Next post...how to entertain 120 6 year olds...