A helping hand

“Don’t underestimate me!” The curtain falls at the end of a play about science, and Fangduo, a cast member who is studying at the Taipei School for the Hearing Impaired, offers a genuine and confident smile. Rehearsals proved difficult, but hardships have given way to glorious triumph. In the audience, tears come to the eyes of the performers’ friends and family members, and they stand and cheer. 

Hearing-impaired students sometimes find it hard to be accepted.

Covestro Taiwan established the MagicMaterial School to provide patient instruction and to strengthen its ­students’ skills. In this way the school has helped countless hearing-impaired students to demonstrate that they “can do it!” By helping the hearing-abled to see the boundless potential of the hearing-impaired, the school is fostering an ethos of equality and mutual respect.

On September 1, 2015, Bayer MaterialScience AG was spun off from its parent company, the German-based pharmaceuticals multinational, to become Covestro. Covestro Taiwan was established on the same day. Lever­aging its expertise in materials science to best meet its social responsibilities, Covestro Taiwan established the MagicMaterial School in 2014. The school first targeted elementary schools that had limited access to educational resources despite not being in particularly remote areas. Then in 2017 it changed its focus to working with schools for the hearing-impaired throughout Taiwan.

As well as leading students from the Taipei School for the Hearing Impaired in performing science plays in partnership with non-hearing-impaired students, in 2018 Covestro also launched training courses for science teachers and a Covestro MagicMaterial School Science Club at the Taichung Special School for Students with Hearing Impairments. It followed up with the same at schools for the hearing-impaired both in Taipei and in Tainan, where Covestro is funding a new ­laboratory classroom that will be finished later this year.

Apart from staging educational and entertaining plays and introducing students to the principles of chemistry while making connections to environmental issues, Cov­estro has in recent years been bringing students with and without hearing impairments into laboratory classrooms to carry out a series of fun scientific experiments inspired by the Harry Potter books and films.

These include lessons on magical molecular gastronomy and magical beast husbandry, as well as on how to create one’s own magical pets, such as enchanted slugs. Magic potions lessons involve concocting liquids with strange ­powers in order to create lava lamps, liquids of many colors that fold over each other in layers, and rainbow fountains. In the field of transfigurations, they conduct various interesting experiments involving invisible ink, magic color mirrors, magic fountains, and colored milk that seems to dance.

The Covestro MagicMaterial School recruited students from the Taipei School for the Hearing Impaired to perform in their play Ah-Qi Has a Secret. (courtesy of Covestro Taiwan)

Grandparent－grandchild connections

To bridge the generation gap within families, Covestro has also launched a Grandparent‡Grandchild Science Camp with “Grandma’s Magic Kitchen” as the main theme. Using basic ingredients found in most kitchens, it pulls grand­parents and grand­children closer together via sweet and delicious food. “Who knew that Grandma was so amazing?” When their grand­children give them rever­ential looks and sing their praises, members of the older generation smile with a mix of bashfulness and pride. 

“The experiments themselves may be quite simple, but they can bring a miracu­lous chemistry into the grandchild‡­grandparent relationship.” Via a model of spiral learning, partici­pants move gradually through a series of related experiments, starting with “sponge toffee,” where they observe two scientific phenom­ena—a change in density and a chemical transformation. After the toffee experiment is completed, they move on to the “baking soda rocket” experiment, mixing baking soda with vinegar to create carbon di­oxide, which serves as a propellant.   

“Whenever a Grandparent‡Grandchild Science Camp opens for enrollment, it quickly fills up. Many participants are in their 70s, and one nonagenarian has even enrolled. Further­more, some four-fifths are doing experi­ments for the first time.” Renee Chen, head of communications for the Covestro MagicMaterial School, takes joy in watching the children recalibrate their understanding of their grandparents.

“Over three weeks,” Chen notes, “we have held nine of these events in northern, central and southern Taiwan, with more than 150 people—grandparents and their grandchildren—attending.”

The science camps have been a smash hit, helping Cov­estro, which has only been established for five years, to win CommonWealth Magazine’s Corporate Social Responsibility Award for four years running. The German Trade Office in Taipei has also selected the company as a model among German companies in Taiwan for corporate social responsibility.

Covestro invited science teacher Shiu Jaufang, who is a science education consultant for various TV stations and magazines and has written several books on science games, to lead students at the Taipei School for the Hearing Impaired in conducting some experiments.

Confronting disparities

The organization Learning in Science (LIS) is also creating alternative popular science teaching materials. This year its CEO Sky Yan was placed on the Inter­national Literacy Association’s “30 Under 30” list of impactful young leaders in the field from around the world.

In 2013, when Yan was still a junior at National Cheng Kung University studying chemistry, he was inspired by Chen Chun-lang—aka Papa Chen, the founder of the Kids’ Bookhouse Foundation—to gain first-hand experience tutoring rural children in Taitung. He hoped to plant seeds of the idea that “knowledge is power” so that flowers of learning would bloom in educational deserts.

“When I left Taichung, where I had gone to elementary school, for junior high school in Taipei, I discovered a start­ling gap in preparation between myself and my peers.” From Taipei Municipal Bailing High School, he entered NCKU, where he encountered classmates who had attended better-resourced elite high schools, such as Taipei Municipal Jianguo High School, the Affiliated Senior High School of National Taiwan Normal University, and Taipei Municipal Chenggong High School. Once again, those dif­fer­ences in preparation left a deep impression.

When ambitious young teachers working in more dis­advantaged areas see students leave en masse and class sizes decline from 20 or 15 to eight or five students, and some classes disappear altogether, the resulting sense of frustration can greatly dampen their enthusiasm for the field of education. Yan began to reflect on whether the loss of students could be partly the fault of teaching mater­ials and teaching methods. From that moment, he began to think hard about how to motivate students to learn.

Covestro has worked with NCKU professor Li Wang-long to establish a science club at the Affiliated School for Students with Hearing Impairments of the National University of Tainan. Here students are conducting a “non-Newtonian fluid” experiment under his guidance.

Online interaction

“Every year we release about 40 sets of teaching mater­ials and educational videos.” Founded in 2015, LIS adheres to its goal of sharing educational resources by providing free video series about physics, chemistry, bio­logy, earth sciences, and how to do scientific experiments.

“Currently, we have about 25 segments for each field. Each segment typically takes a team of six about one month to make. “And we continually update them to make them better.” Yan doesn’t fear failure. He simply wants to do the best he can.

For eight years, the relaxed teaching style and scenario-­based lessons have earned favor with junior-­high and elementary-­school teachers and have gradually garnered corporate support. In 2019 and 2020, LIS worked with Mic­ron Technology and Applied Materials Taiwan to design teaching aids for junior high school teachers, and put on study camps for junior-high natural science teachers. With the Farcent Education Foundation, it organized more than 50 camps for natural science teachers at over 147 elementary schools in New Taipei, Hsinchu, Tainan, and Taipei. “Currently, more than 70% of junior high schools and 30% of elementary schools in Taiwan use our teaching resources.” Publishers such as Nani, Kang Hsuan and Han Lin include LIS materials in their textbooks. LIS’s study camps, training videos and teaching units make teachers’ jobs easier.

To back up scientific theory with experiments, LIS ­continues to develop kits with all the materials needed for interesting experiments. Currently, these include titles such as the “Clay Light-Up Track,” “Rainbow-­Layered Syrup,” and “DIY Earphones.” All one has to do is to scan a QR code to connect with online instruction and games. It makes scient­ific experiments fun and easy. “We’ve been getting a lot of pledges to fund these kits to help rural children.”

An LIS teacher leads a natural science class at Kids’ Bookhouse in Taitung. (courtesy of LIS)

Sharing lights up the world

Alternative science education is like a train full of hope. Its different carriages hold very different content, but they are all rolling toward the same des­tina­tion: to motivate students to learn and to help them to push through dif­ficulties, find themselves and take joy in their own growth.

Michael Lee, the managing director of LIS, understands the importance of upholding an ethos of equality and inclusion by giving back to society and lighting up the world by spreading love.

Similarly, Sky Yan says: “What I care most about is whether these teaching materials can help teachers and students.” Through nearly 100 speeches he has given in Taiwan and abroad, he has shared the power found in helping students to build educational dreams. He believes that beyond strengthening children’s abilities to apply logic and mathematical reasoning, it is even more important that they can develop resilience, creativity, and problem-solving skills.

It is Yan’s wish that in the future LIS will develop a sustainable operating model that will allow the un­hindered sharing of resources, so that it can help as many students as possible to reach their goals.

Through passion, one can tap into the goodness of human nature, listen to the voices of those in need, and sense the hopelessness of lives on the dark side. Education is a powerful means of reform and transformation, and bene­volence is an even stronger force for good. Alternative science education achieves its greatness through its practitioners’ willingness to act to benefit others.    

Learning in Science uses lively scenarios to make dry scientific theory fun and dynamic.

LIS puts on classes for teachers of natural science at Reiyuan Junior High School in Taoyuan. At enrollment priority is given to teachers serving in elementary schools or in remote areas. (courtesy of LIS)

LIS teams bring great passion to designing teaching materials and curriculums.