Project Overview

Based on the inspiration from my volunteering teaching experiences, I created this project to build a bridge between students and teachers with a project aimed at fostering users' interest in science through fun experiments.

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Background

A shortage of teachers and principals across the United States has intensified in recent years, disproportionately affecting rural communities. Rural schools face significant challenges filling vacancies for educators, leading policymakers to study the causes and seek solutions.

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School that are considered the most rural are classified as remote, meaning they are 25 miles from an urban center. The more rural the school, the more challenging recruiting and retaining a qualified teacher becomes. Thirty-nine percent of remote schools struggle to fill positions in every subject.

The imbalance between the number of open positions in demand and qualified teachers willing to fill positions in rural America is due in part to insufficient recruitment and retention of teachers, the high number of retiring baby boomers, and fewer college students majoring in education.

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Enrollment in education programs declined nationwide—from 719,081 to 464,250 students—between the 2008-2009 and 2013-2014 school years, according to a 2016 report from the Learning Policy Institute, which predicts the teacher short- age could reach 112,000 by 2018. The shortage also includes school principals, with an annual turnover rate of 20 percent nationwide.

Out-of-towners don’t stay long in rural schools, but convincing qualified locals to stick around and teach is harder than it sounds.

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Why don’t people who live there, teach there? How to solve the teacher shortage in rural schools?

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Did you know?

• 8.9 million students attend rural schools and more than one in four schools are rural.
• Rural teachers made an average starting salary of $33,200, compared with their suburban counterparts, who earned $40,500.
• By the end of their third year, 50 percent of principals have left the field.

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Across the U.S., about 9.3 million public-school students — or nearly 1 in 5 of all students in the country — attend a rural school, according to a November 2019 report from the Rural School and Community Trust.

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This is the chart that gives policymakers a headache — American students are much less likely to study math and hard sciences than students elsewhere. The proportion of students studying science and computer science is lower than it is in the UK, Germany, France, Greece, Spain, and many other countries.

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Yet only a third of workers (33%) ages 25 and older with at least a bachelor’s degree have an undergraduate degree in a STEM field, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis.

Half of Americans think young people don’t pursue STEM because it is too hard.

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How do we encourage more students to pursue STEM majors in college?

Project Statement

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I had the idea to build a platform helping students around the world learning science experiments when I went to volunteer teaching in Shanxi province, Jincheng city, Changzhi xian. Before I went there, I assumed that children in rural areas lack pens, desks, or bright light to read books; however, they lack teachers who can border their horizons and give them hope to explore the world. The quitting rate of teachers there was up to 80%, even though the school has an excellent physical condition with the multimedia classroom. In this case, the idea to provide opportunities for more children to have access to fun science experiments is essential.

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Most of the teachers there focus on test material and get the children prepared for the secondary school examination. In this case, most of the time, they only speak in classes and do not “waste” time doing physics experiments to show the fundamental theory to children. However, physics experiments are the fun part of physics class, which will inspire children's interest in this subject.

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This project focuses on providing vivid online science experiment experiences to students around the world. Besides that, it also allows students in rural areas to reach out to high-quality teachers in urban areas and build one-on-one connections with them.

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Walkthrough my project