120 Teachers Complete Hands-On STEM Training in Battambang
A week-long institute showed teachers how to turn everyday materials into low-cost science and maths investigations.
This week, 120 primary and lower-secondary teachers from across Battambang traded chalk-and-talk for hands-on experiments at KAPE's annual STEM teaching institute.
The five-day programme focused on a simple but powerful idea: that good science and maths teaching does not require an expensive laboratory. Working in small groups, teachers built circuits from batteries and foil, measured plant growth with paper rulers, and turned plastic bottles into water-filtration models.
From recipe to inquiry
Facilitators encouraged teachers to move away from demonstrations where the outcome is already known, towards genuine investigations where students predict, test and explain. Each participant left with a printed kit of twenty classroom-ready activities mapped to the national curriculum.
My students remember an experiment they did with their hands far longer than a definition I wrote on the board.
KAPE will follow up with three rounds of in-school coaching this term, pairing institute graduates with mentor teachers to keep the new methods alive long after the workshop ends.