Jessica ’27 is empowering young students in Gansu Province, China through hands-on STEM workshops that promote real-world learning, creativity, and confidence beyond traditional test-focused education.
At the beginning of June 2025, I traveled to my mom’s hometown in Gansu Province and visited two cities: Wuwei and Lanzhou. There, I met with more than 200 students and many faculty members from public schools and local tutoring organizations. Unlike Beijing—a fast-paced, modern, and international city I’m very familiar with—Gansu is comparatively less developed in terms of economy and infrastructure. However, it holds a rich cultural heritage and a deep sense of community.
I collaborated with two tutoring organizations and one school to host five sharing sessions for children aged seven to thirteen. Through these sessions, I hoped to help students gain a better understanding of interdisciplinary fields in STEM, explore learning methods beyond textbook memorization, and develop the mindset to face common social stereotypes with confidence and positivity.
When I arrived in Wuwei, I received a warm welcome from the principal of a local tutoring center, Mr. Liu, and prepared for the session with the help of his daughter. During our conversation, Mr. Liu expressed his concerns about students’ and parents’ learning strategies. He explained how the Chinese education system often emphasizes test-taking—unit tests, quizzes, formative and summative assessments—which leads students to focus on memorizing key points rather than understanding the underlying concepts or their real-life applications.
He shared a recent encounter: a few weeks earlier, three students had approached him for advice. Although they had memorized all the key equations, they still felt they were “not good at physics.” Mr. Liu pointed to a concept in their textbook and asked, “Can you give me one example of this in real life?” The students were stumped. The concept could easily be demonstrated by a door opening and closing, or a moving car. Yet their accelerated learning approach had caused them to overlook the crucial questions of “how” and “why.”
I was aware of this trend even before that conversation. While I was planning the sessions, the head of another tutoring organization mentioned that turnout might have been low because students usually spend weekends doing practice tests or attending extra classes. But Mr. Liu’s story gave the issue new urgency. I decided to shift my focus and center my presentation around the importance of learning through real-world application.
I was grateful to have held my first two sessions in Wuwei. Both groups of students were highly engaged during the three-hour workshops and especially enjoyed the hands-on activities. Due to time constraints, I chose simpler challenges—like the egg-drop experiment and building spaghetti-marshmallow towers—rather than conducting full lab experiments. The students were proud of their projects and overcame their fear of presenting in front of an audience. More importantly, they had no trouble expressing their creativity and explaining the reasoning behind their designs. As I walked around the room, I was impressed by the variety and originality of their work—and I learned from them, too. The smiles on their faces, along with their requests for selfies, made all the preparation worthwhile.
I also hosted three sessions in Lanzhou—two in a tutoring organization and one in a public high school. Going forward, I plan to continue this initiative by developing a website that shares survey results, project updates, simple experiment ideas, and resources about careers in STEM.
