PEN Update. 
The Practical Education Network (PEN) empowers K­12 STEM teachers in material resource­ constrained environments to engage their students in hands­-on learning. Currently based in Ghana, PEN hosts workshops that build teacher capacity to use and design effective learning experiences. ​Teachers learn hands­-on activities that complement the national curriculum and use locally­ available materials. In the introductory workshop, teachers are trained on more than 10 activities for the upcoming term’s topics. PEN partners with the Ghana Association of Science Teachers (GAST) to organize and facilitate the trainings.

The activities are drawn from their innovative manual, which contains hundreds of hands­-on activities developed by the PEN team, by teachers in Tanzania, and from open­ source content online. They have mapped these activities directly to the Ghanaian syllabus, enabling teachers to directly integrate the activities into their ongoing lessons.

PEN has designed a constructivist learning experience around each of the activities to enable participants to form their own understanding as they work through the activity. The PEN trainers facilitate an inquiry­-based, team­-driven exploration through the concepts.