Zone Winners Chosen in Primary School Social Studies Quiz
Earlier this year, we told you about the downtown rejuvenation project that is being undertaken by the Belize City Council and the National Institute of Culture and History with support from Taiwan ICDF and the Ministry of Tourism. The plan is to improve the awareness and appreciation of Belize City’s colonial past through the sustainable rejuvenation of buildings and spaces in the downtown area, as well as establishment of an eco-museum. The project seeks to build on the historical values, cultural heritage, community and economic activity. It has both hard and soft components that are aimed at different stakeholders. The soft component is comprised of a Creole Brukdown project, a Christmas Bram, oral history as well as a history and social studies competition. The elimination round for the pilot of that competition was held in Belize City at the Bliss on Thursday. Today, we spoke with Albert Avila of the Downtown Rejuvenation Project, who explains how this ties in to their bigger plan.
Albert Avila
Albert Avila, Community Liaison Officer, HOC & Downtown Rejuvenation Project
“It has a good tie in with what our project wanted to do. We are promoting history and culture and that is promoting history and culture with the young people; so we thought it was a great initiative to do. So, we started to work on it last year November. We were just able to have our zone eliminations yesterday; two zone eliminations we had thirteen schools out of the thirty Belize City schools. This, we consider the pilot project for this initiative. So, we only focusing on Belize City. So we had thirteen schools six in the morning and six in the afternoon. In zone 1 we had three finalists and in zone 2 we had three finalists and those six finalists will go on to the finals next Friday, November 25th at 9a.m and it will be held at the SCA gymnasium.”
Andrea Polanco
“Okay. What are some of the topics or areas covered in this history and social studies competition that the students had to prepare for?”
Albert Avila
“A lot of the questions is based on Belize City history and culture and social studies. We try to incorporate some of the questions from the curriculum from history and social studies from the upper division. But a lot of the questions came from resource books that are out there that is written about downtown Belize and the history. We tried to incorporate a lot of those questions because we found that a lot of our history in downtown is not incorporated in the curriculum for the primary schools. So, we thought let’s get a lot of these new information and put this into the questions. Just by participating, by studying these three hundred questions the participants we hope will remember some, they will probably not be able to remember everything, but that is better than first because they probably didn’t know it at all.”
Andrea Polanco
“From what you saw yesterday, would you say the students perhaps understood what they had studied? Were you satisfied with the level of knowledge that they demonstrated yesterday?”
Albert Avila
“It is interesting that you ask me that. One of the things I was thinking to do, because we haven’t done a post mortem on the competition yesterday but that is one of the analyses we want to do; to see how many of the questions they correctly answered. Just from my memory, I believe we had something maybe 60-50 percent from the questions they were asked they correctly answered. At least up to that point they were very familiar with the answers to those questions.”
As you heard, the finals for the competition will be held next Friday. The finalists will take home a stack of prizes including gift certificates, cash prizes, laptops, computers and other electronic devices courtesy of the Angelus Press, Courts Belize and the Belize Tourism Board.
