An educator and Chief Executive Officer of STEAM Empowerment Foundation (SEF), Olabisi Ozo-Onyali, has called on the government to facilitate children’s exposure to modern technology by investing in STEAM education. According to him, children have the potential to become inventors and innovators.
Ozo-Onyali made the call during a roundtable discussion on Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Craft, Mathematics (STEAM) with newsmen in Lagos.
SEF, which runs STEAM Club, is a STEAM education-based non-governmental organisation, established with the aim of building and impacting concepts of STEAM into children in the African market space, using informal methods from tender age.
SEF method of empowering children involves using hands-on modeling of real-world devices, processes, and offering comprehensive, meaningful learning resources for a rich experience in STEAM that would help them become the next generation of inventors like Michael Faraday and Thomas Edison.
Mrs Ozo-Onyali said: “Every Nigerian child has the potential to become an inventor and an innovator, however, they would need interaction with devices, tools and concepts behind modern technology and scientific techniques. This is because an interaction with these modern technology devices would help give birth and ignite a passion for STEAM in them.
“The Whites we often celebrate don’t have two heads; it is the early exposure from a very tender age and interaction with modern technological devices, coupled with their enabling environment that got them to the heights they have attained, whereas, the story is different in this part of the world, maybe because we are an underdeveloped economy, leaving our children unmatched with their contemporaries globally and unprepared for the future. The truth is that a black child is not different from a white child nor less intelligent. An average black child is even more intelligent, but due to late exposure to STEM related concepts they become limited.”
Mrs Ozo-Onyali said so far, SEF has presence in 50 schools both in Lagos and Abuja, and has trained many young people. “Outside working with private schools, in the last three to four years, we have worked with and trained about 300 undergraduates and Corps members (NYSC) in the area of STEAM education; teaching and exposing them to various concepts of STEAM and models, which include: vibrobrush (the concept behind vibration; powered lamps, rocket science, blender, electronicart, Hydro & Solar generation of power and so on,”she said.
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