The past summer vacation is one of my most unusual holidays. In order to make full use of my two months' free time, I took part in a global volunteering project which located in Penang, the second biggest city in Malaysia. In early July, I waved goodbye to my dear parents and began my journey in this strange land. It was not my first time joining volunteering project, but my first time cooperating with foreigners and doing a project abroad. No doubt that I went through much impressive moments, and I'd like to share some of my experience here.
This volunteering project named Aspire to Inspire. We were supposed to design a series of workshops and science fairs to increase the passion of young students on science. This project began from a survey of Malaysia. It shows that young students are losing their interests upon science. More and more kids want to become entrepreneurs in the future, rather than scientists or engineers. In order to make students feel the charm of science, we designed several interesting chemical experiments. For primary school students we also taught them how to use easy programming tool Scratch and played logical reasoning story games. As for middle school students, we would teach them how to program Arduino, lead them exploring how to combine Arduino with paper models they made.
To be honest, this project was a little challenging for me. Although the contents of these classes were not complex, it was not easy for me to host a workshop last for several hours completely in English. Every time when I prepared for a new workshop, I needed to look up many new words and practiced the pronunciation to make my expression accurate and fluent. However there existed another challenge, that was class management. The content of our workshop was different everyday. Our students came from different schools as well. What's more, half of them were primary school students. As you know, young kids are very active most of the time, and it would be hard to control the order of class.
Luckily I was not along. There were ten volunteers in my project. Although we come from eight different countries, we gathered together in Penang for the same goal. That was to experience new culture and showcase our value here. We got along and cooperated with each other well during this six weeks' project. In order to make our workshops more interesting and attractive, we designed some warm up games and punishments together. Besides, we set up some class rules. These rules were not as serious as school regulations, but more like some short games. So every time when there were too much noise, we would play these games to calm them down. It really contributed a lot.
This is my unforgettable summer vacation. Although I worried about much before I went to Malaysia, the result is that I brought back tons of wonderful memories. By the way, I travelled four cities of Malaysia during this project ^o^
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