Workshop on Innovative Experimental Activities to Promote Scientific Attitude among Students

The session consisted of hands-on learning and discussions on innovative experiments in Physics, Chemistry and Biology.
The objective of the workshop was to promote a scientific attitude amongst young learners. The mentors emphasized the integration of the three main streams of Science i.e. Physics, Chemistry and Biology. They suggested that one should not perform an experiment with the desired outcome in mind.
A teacher should encourage the students to perform experiments, observe results and then find out the reasons for the outcomes. In today’s scenario, students show their interest in pursuing a course in Engineering or Medical, rather than studying Pure science for the undergraduate level culminating in research work. It’s a teacher’s responsibility to motivate them towards the mainstream. For this, the mentors invited the participant schools to bring their students of Grades 9-12 to the lab of the South Delhi Campus (Delhi University) on any Saturday.
The experimental activities executed in the workshop were well planned and self-explanatory. The mentors were excellent guides. Each experiment was done several times, which threw up variations. It was explained, why, every individual experiment, even with identical parameters varied. The teachers were told to encourage similar independent attempts by students in the Labs. This will foster independent research. At the end of every experiment, variations in the results of every group were discussed explicitly.
The mentors ended up the session saying that this is not the end but the beginning, we have to take this forward and involve the teaching fraternity in this great mission.