Background
In Malaysia, the issue of students lacking interest in science and math is becoming more critical. One report in 2012 showed that only 20% of students in the secondary schools are taking up the science stream, while the rest are in the art stream. This is far from our national target to have 60% students taking up the sciences. To make things worse, this number is actually in decline. Malaysia Education Blueprint 2013-2025 reports that we achieved a peak of about 37% students in the sciences back in 1998, which has gone down ever since.
The matter is even more critical when considering how far we are from achieving our national target of a fully developed country by 2020, set by the former Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad back in 1991. As part of this Vision 2020, the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MOSTI) has targeted that Malaysia should have 1.2 million individuals with science-related training, a drastic increase from the current estimate of 120,000 workers with such training as of 2012. Plus, out of this 1.2 million, we should have 500,000 with degrees in science or engineering fields (again, a big jump from the 85,000 that we have today). All these are reported in the Malaysia Education Blueprint.
Given that less than half a million students nationwide each year sit for their SPM exams (at the end of their secondary schooling) with less than 100,000 in the sciences, it seems a gargantuan leap – even almost an impossibility – to achieve what we are targeting in 2020. Nonetheless, the challenge is there and needs to be taken up.
Purpose
We started this FlyOutreach effort to address the issue above. Our main goal in this research project is to increase the interest of secondary school students in science and math. We aim to do this by “bringing” to students the excitement of flying vehicles through learning about the physics of flight, flight demonstrations, and practical activities.
Approach
There are 2 parts to this project. The main part is outreach: reaching out to secondary school students to get them involved in our learning modules and practical activities. The main challenge in this part is to design these modules and activities to make learning and doing aerospace science fun for students, and to make them see clear connections between the sciences that they learn in the classroom to their practical uses in the real world. We also need to assess the impact of our outreach programs on students’ attitude towards science.
The second part is flying vehicle: designing and building our own flying vehicles (mostly unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs) to be used in flight demonstrations in the outreach programs. The main challenge here is to develop our software and hardware capabilities to design and build UAVs that are unique and exciting for demonstrations, from scratch. We also need to integrate other capabilities onto our UAVs to make them more interesting: autonomous flight, live video streaming, etc.