Mission
Stimulating a culture of critical thinking to realise a society that is competent in a modern world.
Basic Principles for all Projects
The many activities organised under the Astrobus-Ethiopia project are to follow the following elements as the core principle. Every activity should be designed such that the audience is allowed to
Get involved in identifying abstract components - be aware of the abstract components of an idea. In other words, the audience should be given the time and opportunity to appreciate (actively aware) the abstract components of the activity at hand, and the abstraction process involved in the activity
Gain new insight via critical thinking - progress to useful insight via composing the identified abstract components by thinking critically. The audience must be invited to actively participate in the critical thinking process of
making further abstractions
composing the abstract components to gain insights
Arrive at multiple interpretations aka viewpoints. This means the audience has developed a rich perception of the activity
by actively exploring orthogonal ideas of the problems to be addressed by the activity
adopting multiple interpretation of the purpose of the objects involved in the activity
engaging with the objects using having on multiple ways of seeing and understanding the objects and ideas from different angles. This step should ensure that the audience understands that rich insights can only be achieved by having multiple viewpoints and interpretations of the issue at hand. The key principle to this process is the belief every object or idea can only be fully appreciated if one acquires multiple ways of looking at it.
The success of a project is evaluated by measuring how much mental shift the activity has caused in the audience’s perception of the activity - a proxy to how much the activity has exposed the power of abstraction, critical thinking and multiple interpretations for building a rich insight.
The audience will hopefully be able to connect these basic principles as told by multiple activities in art, science and technology domains and arrive at a fundamental understanding of “the key to any type of systematic thinking is abstraction coupled with critical thinking which involved experimentation or other techniques”, which is the core message we want to discriminate.
Below we give non-trivial examples illustrating the application of these three basic principles in a realistic project description.
Project 1. Basic Examples
A star
an object on the sky (the obvious)
sun from very far (requires the perception of diminishing light brightness, the universe being bigger than the visible sky,)
a source of electromagnetic radiation (basic physics)
Enjera
a food (the obvious)
a tool to teach density of holes (basic math)
a soft material with brown and white color (basic chemistry)
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