This year this award is given to Dr M Shaheed Hartley, director of Contract Research at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) in Cape Town, for his work promoting science and technology as a career in schools in the Breederiver-Overberg region.
Hartley is a man on a mission, driven by a passion to stimulate young minds. While his day job pays the bills, his extra job takes up the rest of his time, thinking up ways to communicate and engage with educators and learners in disadvantaged schools.
Its largely thanks to Hartley and corporate funders such as PetroSA and Investec that rural schools in the Cape Winelands district of the Western Cape now have thriving science clubs and a new generation of science graduates and practitioners.
“The last five years have been anything but uneventful,” says Hartley, whose key motivation is to see these young scientists become positive role models in their communities.
“The Science for Rural Communities programme, which was begun in 2004, initially targeted 15 schools,” explains Hartley.
“Science clubs or groups were established at the schools and served to develop the interest, enthusiasm and appetite of learners for science, which was a key strategy to ensure that the learners received hands-on experience in the planning, designing and executing of experiments.
“We ran an interschool competition, pitting the learners’ skills against those of their counterparts to help them evaluate their own development and knowledge bases. As a result of the success of the project, it has recently attracted the interest of the national, Eastern Cape and Northern Cape education departments as a potential solution to dwindling learner interest and poor science results achieved in rural schools.”
The first group of interschool winners from the programme have proved something of a phenomenon, says Hartley.
“This group of nine pupils built their science club from scratch and went on to win the inaugural interschool competition. Of those nine, six are now first-year science students — four are at CPUT, one at Medunsa, one at Stellenbosch. The remaining three are entrepreneurs carving successful careers for themselves. All have become outstanding role models in their communities.”
Hartley’s successes are not restricted to this one project. For example, the Women in Mathematics project is also an ongoing outreach programme reaping huge rewards.
“With this project we went into collaboration with the Capetonian Hotel in Cape Town and asked 20 schools to send us the top five female maths learners who come and meet exciting role models from the world of science. We do this every year around Women’s Day, and don’t restrict ourselves to purely maths.
“We attract engineers as well as pure mathematicians and scientists, who all explain to the learners what role maths played in their careers and how they got their careers started through maths,” says Hartley.
Another popular programme achieving good results is the Learner-Meet-Scientist project.
“Here we take children from disadvantaged schools to our laboratories and introduce them to academics from similar backgrounds, so that the children can see how science has played a part in helping them achieve extraordinary things,” said Hartley.