Important:
Deadline for Essay Competition: 12 September 2014. Extended to Tuesday, 23 September 2014.
Bulletin
For the first time in our outreach effort at the School of Aerospace Engineering, we plan to produce a Bulletin for the AEROFAIR 2014 program to assess the views of students and teachers on issues related to science education. This Bulletin will be made freely available in this website and shared with relevant educational institutions such as schools, educational departments, and others who are interested to improve and promote science education in Malaysia. In the Bulletin, we will collect short essays written by students and teachers from participating schools. Special prizes will be awarded to best essays in the teacher and student categories.
Essays
Each participating school is encouraged to send at least two short essays (500 – 1000 words) for each team of 4 students. These essays can be written either by individual students in the team or the teacher accompanying the team either in English or in Bahasa Malaysia. Selected essays will be published in the AEROFAIR 2014 Bulletin. Special prizes will be awarded to 10 best essays in the student category and 5 best essays for the teacher category.
Essays should be emailed to the organizer in digital format as Word of PDF files (complete with the writer’s name, team, and school) on or before 12 September 2014. Please download the Form for School Application here for the email address to submit the essays.
For this year’s AEROFAIR essay competition, students and teachers can choose to write on one of the following four topics:
- Statistics show that secondary school students in Malaysia are becoming less interested to enter the science stream in their upper secondary school (Forms 4 and 5). It was reported in 2012 that only about 20% of students took the science stream. This is far from our Education Ministry’s target to have 60% of students in the science stream to achieve our Vision 2020. What do you think are the main reasons why students nowadays are less interested to enter the science stream?
- Based on the statistics above, what do you think should be done (either at the school, state, or national levels) to get more students enrolled into the science stream?
- Learning science can be an exciting journey when you can practice what you learn in daily life or relate it to understand nature. However, research studies have also found that some students do feel that science subjects are difficult, boring and not relevant to the real world. Please share your own experience in learning science at school and give your opinions on how to make science subjects more interesting at school.
- If you are one of the small percentage of students who will choose or have chosen the science stream, please share your own thoughts and experience why you are interested in science or want to choose the science stream?
Update on 26/8/2014:
We would like to add one more topic for the essay competition. You can also add one relevant picture to support your essay.
- In joining the AEROFAIR competition, students have to work in groups to build either indoor planes, airframe models, or water rockets. For the indoor flight groups, they had to attend our AEROFAIR workshop to learn flight theory and practice building parts of their planes. Please describe your experience in working on these projects and on how this experience affect your views and attitude towards science.
(klik di sini untuk membaca teks di dalam Bahasa Malaysia)