FOUNDATON FEATURE
‘Your ideas are not going to work all the time, and you need to be able to learn from your failures and try again. Or you need to take what you’ve learned and apply it to the next situation that comes up.’ GILLIAN HURST, P.ENG.
CURIOUS CHILDREN, CURIOUS GEORGE When Curious George leaves Planet Earth, he counts on a lot of engagement from young readers. Building off the story Curious George Discovers Space , this boy finds out whether a contraption for pushing four buttons at once will deliver. -photo courtesy BrainSTEM Alliance
given a different challenge each session, like building a Mars rover or creating a machine to push four buttons at once. Curious George was cast as the project client. “That’s basically what you do as an engineer,” says Ms. Hurst. “You have clients or stakeholders, and you need to provide creative solutions for them.” NORTHERN EXPOSURE Children and parents liked the first READesign sessions so much that the volunteer team offered it the next month, too, and again in February 2017. The program then spread to Fort McMurray, with help from the city’s Boys and Girls Club, and then to Fort McKay, a small indigenous community about 60 kilometres from town. To help host the program in Fort McKay, Ms. Wilson-Iherjirika connected with the Canadian Red Cross and the Wood Buffalo Regional Library, which regularly puts on events there. Says Kim Fecteau, Rural Services Coordinator for the library: “One of the biggest things we promote is not just library services, but literacy — everything from math to critical thinking. We feel that READesign really fits what the library represents and that it’s a fun way to learn.” In July 2017, Ms. Fecteau, Ms. Wilson-Iherjirika, and two other volunteers delivered a two-hour workshop at Fort McKay’s community centre. The team took with them boxes of books and supplies, tons of snacks, and a boatload of optimism that the children would be recep- tive. About 16 children aged six to 12 greeted them — and neither volunteers nor children were disappointed. “It was amazing to see them get into it. It was chaos, but it was so much fun,” says Ms. Fecteau.
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