Abstract:

Sciences have been an important part of the Curriculum in Nicaragua for many years. It is found in the national curriculums starting at the first grade all the way through secondary school and is especially important at the university level.

The challenge at all levels is the need to make this education more practical, more applied. Students need to work with real problems. To learn more about the sciences and how they can be useful in their lives. This is a huge social justice problem, as students without the ability to be practical, to apply the sciences they are learning are missing an important ability as they try and compete in the global markets.

UNAN Managua is the largest university in Nicaragua. There are approximately 50,000 students in its five campuses, its rural university programs, institutes, and more. This is huge in a country with a population of about 7,150,000 people. UNAN Managua is often the leader in creating change. This is the expectation in the case of the sciences.

One of the greatest problems that is faced in trying to include applied or practical science into the curriculum is that the teachers were educated without the opportunity to try things. If you have not experimented yourself, how will you know how to teach others to experiment?

The classroom in a rural school has little to no equipment to work with. That alone does not have to be a limiting factor, however most of these teachers are trying to follow national curriculum's, provide for their families and have little free time. The students go to school for six hours a day through the 8th grade and then they are lucky to get six hours a week. Growing men and women sit at the desk of elementary students for six hours a week on Saturday and try to get a high school education. There is little time to devote to the applied basic sciences.

In the university thanks to the miracles of technology students can see many things projected on a screen. Because resources are scarce many materials are kept in storerooms. Teachers at the university level often have not received applied training themselves so they do not know how to offer it in their classrooms.

The authors are members of teams working on this problem at very different levels:
1. The level of the national University in the basic sciences reported on here.
2. The level of primary school as part of the creative school’s program
3. The level of basic science studies or majors at the University.

In this paper the authors report on what the students believe is important to investigate for the poor in Nicaragua. This is important as students need to be interested in what they are doing. When students are interested, they will normally try harder to find answers. It is this interest and sometimes passion that the authors hope to tap into as they work to change the way the sciences are taught, to include much more practical work.

Keywords:

Sciences.