Although the job was just to give the worn out walls a new coat of paint, the Millennia Institute students wanted to do so much more.  By the time the students were done, they had given the chairs a new coat of paint as well, created visual aids for the teachers to assist them in their teaching, and made more than a few smiles bigger and brighter.

Last week, a group of students from Singapore International School in Hong Kong paid a visit to the Philippines with the intention to help out in the communities that needed a helping hand. Aside from participating in “feeding programmes” for orphanages and community centres, they also organised the library and created important visual aids for the science teachers to help them with their lessons.

Many of the schools do not have any funding at all for materials other than books (and even that is not enough) so visual aids often have to be paid for and made by the teachers themselves who are already overworked because of the large classroom sizes which can go up to 90 students.

So the 3D models they made which included the solar system, water cycles, photosynthesis and the systems of the body will go a long way, helping thousands of kids better understand science and hopefully dream bigger dreams in the process.

Most of us probably know about the story of “Velcro”. Swiss mountaineer George de Mestral had returned from a lovely hike with his dog only to discover that his boots and pants (along with his dog) were covered with burrs. Instead of simply being annoyed, he picked up a microscope to look at the tiny things that were grabbing onto his fabric for dear life.

Nature apparently had made these tiny little hooks that are incredibly strong once they had a loop to sink their teeth into- George took this idea and developed “Velcro” (which comes from the combination of velour and crochet).

Now, here’s the deal.

It’s not as if George was the first person to have cockleburs attached to him after a nature hike. Prickly burrs have been plaguing people since they started wearing fabric. But it took the intellectual curiousity and sticky determination (lots of trial and error) of a George de Mestral to gain inspiration from this annoyance and turn it into one of the most recognizable and useful inventions in the world.