UEA academics Professor Stephen Ashworth (School of Chemistry) and Dr Susan Matthews (School of Pharmacy) have just completed a whirlwind of activities in Brunei Darussalam as part of their ongoing British Council project: Empowering Primary Teachers to deliver STEM in the classroom, with the Universiti Brunei Darussalam. Over 10 days they delivered workshops for in-service teachers on using demonstrations in the classroom, a train the trainer workshop for staff from the Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah Institute of Education (SHBIE), UBD, a competition and dissemination event for current MTeach students at UBD, a one-day workshop on education research (The case of the missing evidence) for academics from UBD and visited the Seria Energy lab, Brunei’s only Science centre to work with the science communicators there.

A Memorandum of Understanding signing, a first all university agreement for UBD, cemented the relationship between UEA and UBD and facilitated a range of meetings with academics from the Office of Research, SHBIE, The Institute of Health Sciences and the Faculty of Science to  discuss how the two universities can work together in research and teaching with a  special emphasis on expanding student exchange programmes.

This was all rounded off by the delivery by Professor Ashworth aka the Kitchen Chemist of five Kitchen Chemistry Shows to students, teachers and parents in Bandar Seri Begawan and Seria.

More information about the project can be found at https://bruneiprimarystem.education/ and @STEM4Brunei on X, formerly known as Twitter.