More than 90 secondary school teachers from all seven districts of Nepal gathered in March 2020 to explore and test a variety of innovative tools and methods designed for mainstreaming nuclear science into existing scholastic curricula across the country of 28 million. Organized as part of a broader regional technical cooperation (TC) project[1] which aims to introduce nuclear science to at least 1,000,000 students in Asia and the Pacific, the national training course not only refreshed the nuclear knowledge of the attending teachers, it equipped them with the concrete tools—including lesson plans, soft-skills training and assessment criteria—necessary to transmit nuclear science and ideas to their pupils.
Originally launched in 2018, the ongoing regional project is focusing its support on national events in order to reach teachers and students in rural, sometimes remote, towns and villages. Reinforced by new teaching tools, this project—the first time that the Agency has formally engaged with the secondary education teaching community—is now bearing fruit, as secondary school children in Nepal learn how nuclear science is used every day around them, to their benefit.
Held in Kathmandu, Nepal, the three-day training course was organized around a series of 12 classroom lectures, beginning by with a review of the fundamentals of nuclear science and their real-world applications. After refreshing the knowledge of the 97 assembled science educators on the principles of radioactivity, the fundamentals of radiation protection and the multitude of industrial and healthcare applications of nuclear science, the lecture series was followed by technical visits to Bhaktapur Cancer Hospital and Bir Hospital, located in Bhaktapur and Kathmandu respectively, so that the teachers could see first-hand how radiotherapy and nuclear medicine are used to diagnose and treat cancers.
