Chauke: The former teacher who invented Zim’s first schools’ mobile science lab
UNLIKE many inventions, the country’s first schools’ mobile science laboratory was not born out of an intense desire to beat the other person to the patent office.
While science labaratories are a fairly common thing in urban schools, many rural schools do not have this luxury. Thus, the idea of a mobile science laboratory that could be pulled or pushed around is one that every rural science teacher would love to have within reach. At least such a contraption would take away the need to build the more expensive classroomtype buildings to house science laboratories which may in fact then disable the school to be able to fund the acquisition of needed science tools.
For decades though, there was very little anyone could offer to the rural aspiring medical doctor or engineer. Since the turn of the millennium, people have envisioned a world where they would be able to have a means to encourage Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths (STEM) among rural scholars, whether under a tree or otherwise. With the progress of technology, it was just a matter of time before this became a reality. It wasn’t hard to see why people would think that the invention of a mobile science lab as we know them today would happen much sooner than it did.
Tinkering rather noisily in his own little ‘lab’ in Gwabalanda, Bulawayo former teacher, Thulani Chauke has been working for many years to try and refine his Sci-Cart, a fully equipped mobile science is 50cm x 50cm when closed and has a span of 2m x 2m when open with a height of 90 cm.
According to Chauke, 20 students can use the Sci-Cart at one go. He said it has the added advantage of allowing the classroom (for those rural schools with such a privilege) being used for science to be used for another subject immediately after a science lesson.
“The Sci-Cart can be folded away and put somewhere safe after a science lesson and so if a school has classrooms but no standard laboratories, this becomes the solution to the problem. It also means a school can buy one of these and lessons can be held under trees even,” Chauke explained.
At a cost of US$850 per unit, the Sci-cart work out cheaper than building and furnishing standard laboratories which can be anything from between US$15 000 and US$20 000, well out of the reach of many schools in the country.