The SciFest is held once a year in Grahamstown at the Settlers Monument. This year, it will take place on from the 18th till the 24th of March. The theme is “The Year of Light”. We will present our awarenet programme to the visitors, i.e. teachers are invited to a short presentation and all users are encouraged to log into awarenet and try out its features and tools. There will be laptops present. Learners from various local schools that are involved in our awarenet programme will present the work that they have done using the awarenet platform. It will give visitors a feel of the social learning network. Thereafter, learners and teachers have the opportunity to write blogs (e.g. about their SciFest experience) or comment on other blogs or pictures uploaded by the awarenet users.
We have integrated 3rd party content into awarenet, e.g. various educational videos such as socio-cultural videos made by our partner Upstart as well as science and math tutorials by the Khan Academy. Visitors can watch the videos and try out the exercises, some of them themed physics and light. Additionally, we will exhibit posters created by our learners during the awarenet sessions at the various schools. This year, they will be about “Life after School”.
We hope that like last year lots of teachers and learners will visit our stand so we can improve the level of awareness and attract more schools to our awarenet programme.