Ivy Aspire Nigeria

Women and girls are making waves in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) thereby paving the way for other females and acting as nentors.

Here is Anjali Chadha, a 15-year-old student who lives in Louisville, Kentucky, USA.

Anjali is a junior at duPont Manual High School in the Math, Science, Technology Magnet program. She has deep passion in the areas of technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship. She enjoys applying her knowledge of software development and engineering to help solve real-world problems.

Anjali is a junior at duPont Manual High School in the Math, Science, Technology Magnet program. She has deep passion in the areas of technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship. She enjoys applying her knowledge of software development and engineering to help solve real-world problems.

This quality lead to her founding a nonprofit called Empowered at the Catapult Ideas Entrepreneurship Incubator. The mission of Empowered is to train underserved high school girls in technological skills and pair these students with minority women entrepreneurs in their community. Anjali is an intern at an impact investing firm called Access Ventures in order to further connect with businesses and youth in the Louisville community as well as learn more about microfinance.

She serves as the Chair of the JCPS IdeaFestival, a district wide initiative where student speakers present their ideas on technology, education, politics, and social change. She was also involved in organizing a women entrepreneur roadshow for Global Entrepreneurship Week and in facilitating the screening of the documentary She Started It across the region.

Anjali received a composite score of 36 on the ACT as a freshman. She has had a great deal of success in various Science Fairs like Intel ISEF, National Junior National Sciences and Humanities Symposium, ISWEEEP, Junior Academy of Sciences, and Kentucky Science and Engineering Fair, where she has won several top awards. She is also an MIT Think Finalist and a candidate for the Research Science Institute at MIT over the summer of 2018.

She is one of 9 students in the acclaimed documentary Science Fair, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival in January 2018. The movie won the “Fan Favorite” award at Sundance among other film festival awards. She is a voracious reader and has a deep love for literature, art, and music.

Source: www.startupgrind.com

We bet most of you don't know this fact about spring.

Fun Fact: The first day of spring, also known as Vernal Equinox, is the only time the sun rises in the east and sets in the west for everywhere across the world.

TGIF!!! We all know what day it is as the week ends and weekend begins.

We just want you to know that you are so worth it no matter what you may have faced or gone through in the course of the week.

Stay Strong!
Happy weekend!

After the scandal created by the Sex-for-marks fiasco at the University of Ibadan, the National Universities Commission (NUC) has gone on to charge Vice-Chancellors of Nigerian Universities to publish the names of lecturers found wanting over allegations of s*xual harassment of their students.

The Executive Secretary of NUC, Prof. Abubakar Rasheed, gave this charge at the Redeemer’s University in Ede, Osun, on Monday, during the 33rd annual conference of the Association of Vice-Chancellors of Nigerian Universities (AVCNU)..

He said that the reforms had been working and helping to reduce the ratio of corruption in the university system.

“Our major crisis now is s*xual harassment.Whether we like it or not, I want to charge the AVCNU at this meeting to make it a priority in the communique, to take a decisive action on this challenge.

“The universities should be willing to punish and stamp out the incidences of s*xual harassment, because it is damaging to our collective reputation; and we just have to do something.

“Please say it and do it; and whenever you punish or sanction somebody in this regard, let your effort be duly publicised.

“Let the world know that somebody has lost his or her job because of s*xual harassment or somebody has been demoted from being a Professor to Lecturer1 because of s*xually harassing a student.

“We, in the NUC, will be helping you.We can be collecting the names of the offenders monthly and advertising in all the newspapers to expose them as culprits of s*xual harassment, because we are determine to fight them.

“If lecturers that were told not to take advantage of innocent girls and boys in the universities decide to do so because they have the power to award marks, then we will equally fight them,” he said.

Source: dailypost.ng

Nigeria is set to produce another Serena Williams, as we already have one in the making. We proudly announce this young tennis star, more of a prodigy, Marylove Edwards.

This 13-year old started playing tennis at age 4 under the supervision of her father, Eddy Edwards. According to the Nigeria Tennis Federation, Edwards is currently the fourth best tennis player in the country.

Edwards won her first tournament in the US, USTA Celsius Level 6 girls’ 14 and Under tournament, late last year. The champion has participated and won several competitions including the Mid-Western Oil and Gas Junior Open and Gauteng North Belgrave Sportsman’s Warehouse Tournament in South Africa. With role models Serena and Venus Williams, she dreams of being the first Nigerian female tennis player to win a Grand Slam.

Source: guardian.ng

These words of George Orwell clearly show why education is paramount. A person needs and deserves to think for himself/herself, not for someone else to do the thinking for that person.

Support and encourage quality and inclusive education today. Good morning!

This year, two Nigerian writers Chimamanda Adichie and Nnedi Okorafor have been nominated for an alternative Nobel Prize for Literature. An exciting news because no Nigerian has won the Nobel Prize for Literature since Wole Soyinka did in 1986.

Adichie is a novelist, writer of short stories, and nonfiction. She has written the novels Purple Hibiscus (2003), Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), and Americanah (2013).

Okorafor is a Nigerian-American writer of fantasy and science fiction for both children and adults. She wrote Shadow Speaker (2001), Full Moon (2005), Kabu-Kabu (2013) among others.

The alternative Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded by a Swedish non-profit organization called The New Academy.

The New Academy was founded on the initiative of a Swedish journalist and author Alexandra Pascalidou following the announcement of the Swedish Academy that the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature has been postponed due to s*x allegations.

It opened the doors for Swedish Librarians to nominate authors from across the world who have “told the story of humans in the world”.

The winner will be announced on October 14th and presented at a formal event with a grand celebration on December 10th 2018.

The environment in education, that is the classroom environment, is very important but it has been overlooked up until very recently, when a lot of research started going into it.

The classroom environment has to be Positive, meaning that within the classroom the environment should not be negative but moral and encouraging, not immoral and filled with enthusiasm.
The classroom environment has to be Caring, meaning that within the classroom environment there should be love, compassion and empathy, which is why Social and Emotional Learning has emerged.
And last but not the least,
The classroom environment has to be Respectful. In Nigeria, that would seem absurd but respect they say is reciprocal, meaning that teachers need to respect students and their rights even as students respect teachers which has always been mandatory.

In the words of John Hattie, "A positive, caring, respectful environment is a prior condition to learning."

Regardless of how busy we are, we cannot underestimate the importance of cultivating a classroom culture in which students feel valued and respected because if our students aren't learning, the other tasks are meaningless.

Curated from Edutopia

Monday!!!
Time to implement.

Today's Fun Fact Friday is quite amazing and unbelievable but very educating.

Fun Fact Friday: Snails have thousands of teeth, ranging from 12,000 to over 20,000.

The teeth are arranged in rows on a chitinous ribbon and together form the radula (tongue). A typical snail tongue or radula may have 120 rows of 100 teeth i.e. around 12,000 teeth, though some species of snail may have more than 20,000 teeth.

The average garden snail has over 14,000 of them, which are arranged in rows on their tongue.

Ever wondered what the aim of a PhD is? Other than attaining the highest academic cadre or becoming a professor?

Well, we do have the answer to that. A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos/accolades. Too much research is aimed at insular academic circles rather than the real world.

Taking a look at the world and Nigeria, in particular, it is not hard to conclude that the current PhD system is fundamentally broken.

With the help of Julian Kirchherr's write-up, we hope to throw more light on this;

Mental health issues are rife: approximately one-third of PhD students are at risk of having or developing a psychiatric disorder like depression. What’s more, aspiring scientists who manage to finish usually take much longer than originally planned. For instance, a PhD in Germany is supposed to take three years, according to university regulations, but most students need five years to complete one. In the US, meanwhile, the average completion time for a PhD in education sciences surpasses 13 years. The result is that in most countries, PhD students usually don’t graduate until they are well into their 30s (or in Nigeria, 50s-60s).

Although 80% of science students start their PhD with the intention to pursue a career in science, their enthusiasm typically wanes to the point that just 55% plan to continue in academia when nearing graduation. One study found that for every 200 people who complete a PhD, only seven will get a permanent academic post and only one will become a professor.

Many academics enter science to change the world for the better. Yet it can often feel like contemporary academia is more about chasing citations. Most academic work is shared only with a particular scientific community, rather than policymakers or businesses, which makes it entirely disconnected from practice. It can often feel like contemporary academia is about chasing citations rather than changing the world. Academics love definitions, not solutions.

The academy should incentivise scholars to improve society, not chase citations. A PhD should be designed not to win kudos within the academic community, but rather aimed at discovering something new that will be useful for practitioners and have real social impact.

This new PhD would see students go out into the field and talk to practitioners from day one of their research, rather than spending the first year (or more) reading obscure academic literature. Students would then co-create the content of their theses with their supervisor as well as practitioners in their field of research.

Instead of labouring over every sentence of a 100,000-word dissertation locked away in an office, PhD students would share a concise 2,000-word draft with those practitioners to collect targeted feedback. They would finish their PhD when they have made a difference in the real world.

It’s time to disrupt the current PhD system to make it better for early-career researchers. We need to move away from a self-referential culture in which academics talk only to their peers. Confucius said one of the core principles of the academy should be as follows: “The essence of knowledge is, having it, to apply it”. Reminding ourselves of this may help to fix the broken PhD machine.

The true aim of PhD, which is part of education, can be found in education itself. And that is to use the knowledge acquired for the betterment of mankind and not for aggrandisement.

These court shoes were popular school shoes in the 90's. You could see students all decked out in them, even pictures of students in the primary English readers.

Let's see those who used these shoes by sharing if you are one of them.