What open science hardware tool(s) will be the focus of your event?
Foldscope microscope
Epidemiology Modeling Software (EMOD)
Describe your course or workshop, whom and what it is for, where and when it will be held, how many attendees (IRL or virtual) you expect.
Two days Open Science Hardware (OSH) workshop will be organised to engage high school students in under-resourced communities of the Volta region of Ghana on how Open Science Hardware can be used to diagnose infectious diseases like malaria and COVID-19 About 200 Students will be introduced to open-source diagnostic tools like foldscope microscopes that can be used to detect infectious diseases and samples. They will also be introduced to a malaria diagnostic kit called the Malaria LAMP (Loop-Mediated Isothermal Amplification) kit which employs isothermal amplification to find the presence of malaria parasites in blood samples. It is a portable diagnostic device that is inexpensive, simple to use and locally manufactured. These practical sessions will expose students to basic experimentation techniques such as microscopy and testing for malaria and COVID-19 using LAMP assays for the diagnosis of infectious diseases. Students will be put in smaller groups to participate in these basic experiments.
This event will be facilitated by a team of research fellows who are under the Centre’s Wellcome Trust Developing Excellence in Leadership, Training and Science (DELTAS) Africa initiative programme. Facilitators will give short presentations to students about their work and research in the area of infectious diseases and topics such as the ethics of vaccine distribution and the role of open science in global health. Students may gain a more comprehensive understanding of challenges and opportunities in these fields.
Do you have plans for ongoing activities after this event OR is it intended that the participants will continue activities after this event? If so, describe the intentions and plans here.
This will be an annual programme and engagement activity
What event outputs (e.g. teaching materials, curricula, software, etc.) will you make available? Will these outputs carry an open licence?
The engagement sessions will be documented and videos will be created
What will you use the grant for, roughly?
Stationary
Snacks for Kids
Stipend for facilitators
Travel cost
Provide links (references) to documentation or reviews of similar
events o
Name: Ohai Blessing
Name of Organisation: The Nigerian Society of Engineers Student Branch (NSE-SB) Faculty of Engineering, University of Nigeria (Nsukka).
What open science hardware tool(s) will be the focus of your event?
Arduino UNO kits
ESP 32/8266 kits
Actuators
Sensors
Electrical/Electronic components
Internet Bundle
Describe your course or workshop, whom and what it is for, where and when it will be held, and how many attendees (IRL or virtual) you expect.
The “MakerWare Design Programme” is an embedded system design training that is part of our Professional Development Programme and held every semester to teach novices/beginners how to design and implement embedded/electronic systems using open-source tools. The training will be held at the Faculty of Engineering – University of Nigeria, Nsukka, from the 15th - 27th of May, 2023. It would be a physical program and about 200 persons are expected to be in attendance consequent to past programmes. The programme is scheduled to hold 3-hours per day for three times a week over the course of two weeks.
Do you have plans for ongoing activities after this event OR is it intended that the participants will continue activities after this event? If so, describe the intentions and plans here.
Yes, we have made plans to host a “3D CAD printing” programme after the “MakerWare Design Programme” during which students will learn how to design and prototype 3D models, and again employ all that they will learn from the 2-weeks “MakerWare Design Programme” and prototype an idea/product. Also, we would hold subsequent meetups for follow up as we are a tech community.
What event outputs (e.g. teaching materials, curricula, software, etc.) will you make available? Will these outputs carry an open license?
We would use open-source tools for the design and implementation sessions in this programme and our curriculum and teaching materials would be documented and made available via GitHub too.
What you will use the grant for, roughly.
Based on inflation adjusted estimations -
$320 - for Purchasing the equipment and components for the programme
$180 - for Logistics and Technical Support
Provide links (references) to documentation or reviews of similar events or works you have executed. School coursework or projects can be listed, even social media posts. Anything to give a sense of what you’re about and your ability to successfully conduct this
course or workshop. To keep this short, just the links and their descriptions will do.
Just a note for everyone using the forums, you should be able to click on your original posts and make whatever edits or updates you need.
There is a record of when those edits were made and it will publicly show that you edited something. So maybe you don’t do that after the deadline, or if you have to just make a note about what got changed in what you submitted
Thank you all for participating in the review process, and for putting up with the administrative delay.
There were 24 microgrant applicants, with 20 participating in the review process. As there were 20 microgrants, all who participated in the review process will be awarded a USD500 microgrant, pending due diligence.
Here is the list of the 20 awardees, ranked with the most favourably reviewed at the top. You’ll be hearing from us, and please keep us posted!
The ordering of this list reflects the kind of short course or workshop that the community is interested in, and this will help us to more appropriately direct our focus in future calls.
Please do update us on the outcome of your event here on the forum! We aim to make this sort of microgrant call a regular thing, and your event updates will help in the review process when you apply in the next call.
Finally, thank you all for the optional comments that you provided during the review. One salient point was that it was hard to distinguish between science and general STEM events. This was reflected in the bimodal scores received by some applications. We’ll do some reflecting in this regard.
We had a fantastic weekend building microscopes, geeking with colourful LEDs for illumination and using both the DIY versions and some other “professional” microscopes for BioVJing into our neightbours festival! We had some nice cultures already going on that suits well for making animated lively videos, Euglena have been growing a few months, a big tank full of waterfleas (Daphnia) and some spirulina bubbling in the corner. Due to bad weather we didn’t go out for a field trip to sample more soil and check the microbes living within…
The applicants have been contacted, and they know what’s going on, so this is an update for the community.
Most of the awardees have passed due diligence and are providing or have provided bank details to receive the USD500. A small number of awardees are having the paperwork ironed out. Some of these are not “organisations” in the required sense, and some need to find fiscal sponsors to receive the money.
Thanks for the possibility!
