A helping hand
“Don’t underestimate me!” The curtain falls at the end of a play about science, and Fangduo, a cast member who is studying at the Taipei School for the Hearing Impaired, offers a genuine and confident smile. Rehearsals proved difficult, but hardships have given way to glorious triumph. In the audience, tears come to the eyes of the performers’ friends and family members, and they stand and cheer.
Hearing-impaired students sometimes find it hard to be accepted.
Covestro Taiwan established the MagicMaterial School to provide patient instruction and to strengthen its students’ skills. In this way the school has helped countless hearing-impaired students to demonstrate that they “can do it!” By helping the hearing-abled to see the boundless potential of the hearing-impaired, the school is fostering an ethos of equality and mutual respect.
On September 1, 2015, Bayer MaterialScience AG was spun off from its parent company, the German-based pharmaceuticals multinational, to become Covestro. Covestro Taiwan was established on the same day. Leveraging its expertise in materials science to best meet its social responsibilities, Covestro Taiwan established the MagicMaterial School in 2014. The school first targeted elementary schools that had limited access to educational resources despite not being in particularly remote areas. Then in 2017 it changed its focus to working with schools for the hearing-impaired throughout Taiwan.
As well as leading students from the Taipei School for the Hearing Impaired in performing science plays in partnership with non-hearing-impaired students, in 2018 Covestro also launched training courses for science teachers and a Covestro MagicMaterial School Science Club at the Taichung Special School for Students with Hearing Impairments. It followed up with the same at schools for the hearing-impaired both in Taipei and in Tainan, where Covestro is funding a new laboratory classroom that will be finished later this year.
Apart from staging educational and entertaining plays and introducing students to the principles of chemistry while making connections to environmental issues, Covestro has in recent years been bringing students with and without hearing impairments into laboratory classrooms to carry out a series of fun scientific experiments inspired by the Harry Potter books and films.
These include lessons on magical molecular gastronomy and magical beast husbandry, as well as on how to create one’s own magical pets, such as enchanted slugs. Magic potions lessons involve concocting liquids with strange powers in order to create lava lamps, liquids of many colors that fold over each other in layers, and rainbow fountains. In the field of transfigurations, they conduct various interesting experiments involving invisible ink, magic color mirrors, magic fountains, and colored milk that seems to dance.
The Covestro MagicMaterial School recruited students from the Taipei School for the Hearing Impaired to perform in their play Ah-Qi Has a Secret. (courtesy of Covestro Taiwan)