BENGALURU: When Arthur Eisenkraft, a science educator from the US, began his lecture in a half-empty auditorium at TERI last Friday, there was some excitement. As he gradually went over his course, the excitement increased and people were busy thinking of various ideas and keen on sharing it. After all, it isn’t too often that someone asks you to come up with a sport you can play on the Moon!

At the end of his lecture, punctuated with activities using several props, not many had still realised why he was posing this challenge, or, how he had drawn into attempting to solve it. It wasn’t important to pick a sport and make it work on the Moon, that may never happen.

What was important was to know about the Moon, its conditions, the gravity there, the friction, the kind of projectile you can expect there, why would we weigh only one sixth of our weights on earth there, how it is easier to lift yourself than push on the Moon and so on.

He taught all of that to the audience that day, in less than two hours. What Arthur -- a distinguished professor of science education and director of the Center of Science and Math in Context (COSMIC) at the University of Massachusetts -- displayed there was the art of science teaching.

“This is just one example of a challenge, but a lot of research shows that challenges get kids motivated and what we are trying to do in America is to have this kind of teaching everyday. I understand it may be a difficult task for you here to do it everyday, but your teachers must try and do it once a month, then make it twice a month and progress,” he said.

This kind of active teaching does get the results, although it may not be in sync with our education system that’s embalmed with grades and conventional rote-driven examinations.

P Sridhar, who quit a well-paying engineering job in 2014 to teach and mentor the government school children with some active teaching, has found out that it works. He uses robotics, and prepares kids to participate in competitions.

Learning to make these “cool robots” children actually learn other aspects of science. Mathematics, for example, is something his students have picked up well, they are able to calculate the distance a robot needs to travel to get a task done, or the time taken for a command to be executed and so on. They understand why it is important to solve some of those equations, he says.

Nobel Laureate David J Gross, while explaining why it is important to draw children to science early, says: “...India will never be able to invent anything, if things do not change. The way you perform, act, teach must change.”

Prof CNR Rao, one of India’s most distinguished scientists has time and again expressed the need to get active science teaching. “Good research happens in the labs.

And for our youth to get to the labs, they must be excited in science, and that excitement just does not come with repeating the same things year after year,” he had said during an earlier lecture.

The scientific community in the country is with Arthur and Rao, and hope that there are more Sridhars, but India is lagging behind in this area and the time has come to change.

Facebook Twitter Linkedin EMail