In the summer of 2011, MIT PhD student Heather Beem travelled to a rural region of Ghana to try engaging students from low-resource schools in hands-on learning projects. She began by asking a group of high school students what they wanted to work on. “They said, ‘Anything, whatever you want,’” Beem recalls. Hoping to narrow things down a bit, she asked what kinds of materials they had to work with. “As soon as I mentioned materials, the atmosphere in the room changed,” Beem says. “Because the students felt sort of…
