Before starting let me tell you two stories.
Story-1
When I was in standard 8 in our science class teacher was taking a class on reflection of light. To better understanding the process of reflection the sir threw a piece of chalk on the wall from one side and the piece reflected on the other side. As there was no access to some equipment or hands-on plug and play science exhibits, the teacher had to do such activities to clear the concept of the students.
Story-2
In one of our science class of 10th standard when the science teacher was teaching us magnetic field lines, he brought a bar magnet and put it on a table and spread an amount of dust iron. After spreading the dust iron automatically arranges itself and makes some curved line from north pole to south pole. Here the teacher had to collect a bar magnet from the laboratory, an amount of dust iron from another place and had to done some process to show it successfully to the students.
Plug And Play Type Science Exhibits
Now I will introduce two hands-on plug and play type science exhibits of our mini science centre which will explain the above science concept with 30 percent of the efforts given by the teachers.
Our first exhibit is ‘Reflection of light’. In this exhibit a movable LED light source is attached with a protractor which can be moved along the circumference of the protractor. There is a tiny mirror which is attached with the on the centre of the protractor so that from any angle the incident light can be reflected by the mirror. When a light is incident on the mirror from any angle, say from an angle 30o and will see that the reflected ray also passes through an angle 30o from another side. From this exhibit the students get a clear view of reflection of light with just a very small effort of the teachers.
Our 2nd mini science centre exhibit is ‘Magnetic Field’ In this exhibit there is some dust iron filled inside a tube and the tube is filled with a liquid so that the dust iron can move any where freely. A very strong iron is attached out side the tube with a thread. Now when we shake the tube and attach the magnet on the surface of the tube, we will see slowly the iron dust arranges itself along the magnetic force line. Here the effort of the teacher to bring the bar magnet, dust iron and go through a process to show the final result can be easily avoided by just a single hands-on exhibit. Like this in our mini science centre there are more than 75 hands-on plug and play type exhibits which are more or similar practical to learn.
STEM leaning mini science centre has a great impact on changing the pedagogy of teaching way of learning the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. One research says that using the mini science centre exhibits can reduce the effort of a teacher while teaching science concepts by 50-60 percent. Parallelly our mini science centre creates an interest-hike in students by 10 to 15 percent. The most positive impact of our mini science centre is that the under-privileged students who can not afford to access the new way of learning can be benefitted by it helps them to access the next level of learning procedure. For this we obviously very thankful to our clients without whom it won’t be possible.
About Author: Sajid Mostaque has total work experience of 3 years in corporate world. He is a Program Implementation Associate. He is working with STEM Learning from last 9 months.
