What is FHSST?
The Free High School Science Textbook (FHSST) project is our contribution towards furthering Science Education in South Africa.
As young South Africans who believe in building up our country, we want to use our skills as scientists to help our next generation by providing free science and mathematics textbooks for Grades 10-12 to all South African learners.
Science education is about more than Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics... It's about learning to think and to solve problems which are valuable skills that can be applied through all spheres of life. Teaching these skills to our next generation will help them when it is their turn to make a difference to our country.
Objectives
- To provide a complete high school science text that can be used for free anywhere else in the world as needed
- To provide a free resource, that can be used alone or in conjunction with other education initiatives in South Africa, to any/all learners and teachers
- To provide a detailed, accurate and interesting text that adheres to the South African school curriculum
- To provide a text that is easy to read and understand even for second-language English speakers
- Make a difference in South Africa through helping to educate our next generation
Principles
The driving force of this project is based on the ideas and principles of the free software community where each person does their part to build something great together.
The Free High School Science Texts project is above all a collaborative effort. It is centrally administered, managed and grown, but has been successful due to the efforts from volunteers. We realise that no single person has enough time to spend days and weeks writing a free textbook. What we have done is to combine many small contributions from volunteers across the world into a quality text.
Team
The project was initiated by Mark Horner, a UCT post-graduate physics student at the University of Cape Town, but has since grown to a much larger group of contributors including students, lecturers and people in industry.
What do we mean by "free"?
The word "free" has 2 meanings... the kind of free where you do not have to pay for something and free: the state of freedom.
These books intend to be both ... we want them to be distributed at no cost, and we also want teachers to have the freedom to copy or change the content as much as they need to suit their classroom, without having any copyright problems to worry about.
For this reason we decided to license the books under the GNU FDL (Free Documentation License) which allows distribution of the book in any format and for any price (even for no price). Anyone can add or remove content, but when they do this, they must be willing to distribute any derivative works under the GNU FDL, which we may then add to our book if we think it is a good idea.
