Volunteer Society Nepal : The best experience for volunteers, the best value for Nepal.
LEGO® for Nepal is a two week long school exchange program for high school students between the age of 15 and 19 year old. LEGO® for Nepal is a program developed by Volunteer Society Nepal in collaboration with the Edulent Foundation. Last month, a team of high school students, with teacher guidance, came to Nepal. They worked together with a Nepali school and set up a two new Nepali LEGO® Challenge teams. For both teams the collaboration was a huge success. It set the stage for future collaborations and more teams and projects to come.
Before the Dutch Lego® team came to Nepal 24 Nepali students of the CBIA school were selected to participate in the program. Once arrived, the Dutch youngsters first started a range of activities to get everybody familiar with each other. After that the real work began. The Nepali teams were divides in two teams and started working on team yells, PR and designed their own t-shirts. But most of all they started to work on the Lego® Robotics. Putting the Lego together and learning how to program the robots. This was the most challenging part, but all the students showed an amazing will to learn and work hard to make the project succeed. The most important part was that learning in this project is fun! Students worked hard out of their own will and learned a lot while doing so.
It wasn’t all work at the school. The volunteers from the Netherlands also needed to see the rest of Nepal! They only had little time but Volunteer Society Nepal arranged a great program for them in which they would visit local sites in and around Kathmandu. They visited the Monkey temple, Bhaktapur, Bouddha and Pashupatinath. After a couple of days we took them out hiking at the valley rim. In the morning they saw the beautiful Himalaya Range during sunrise. And last but not least we went to Chitwan Jungle Park. Here the group spotted rhino’s, dear, monkeys, wild elephants and boars, among many other smaller animals.
At the end of the two weeks there was a challenge day in which the two Nepali Lego teams had a small competition. Both teams did really well and one team won! The Dutch team was very proud to see the successes of these teams and how dedicated they were. Some even shed a tear by realizing that the program was such a big success.
Looking ahead the biggest challenge is to invite more Lego teams to come to Nepal and keep the program going. The CBIA school will hopefully receive funding for setting up a special area for the teams to practice and learn even more. We at CBIA and Volunteer Society Nepal want to thank the Dutch Casimir Tech team and Edulent foundation of making this program a big success!
The program was also made possible with the help of:
If you want more information about this program please visit the website of the Dutch Edulent Foundation, and the First Lego League. Or visit our project page.