EXPERIMENTAL/INNOVATIVE LEARNING

When I was a student, I always thought why these teachers are teaching this all stupid physics,chemistry to us when there is no use of it in daily life. Why do we study all this??? Why??Is it just that we have to earn a Degree, we want to be Graduate?Now, after entering into teaching profession and coming across few brilliant personalities, I realize and regret that we have wasted our precious time which we could have utilized effectively and how these scientific principals are actually related to our day to day life although we don’t realize that as we have been taught in the way where focus was on theory resulting in our thinking ability to get shrunk as and when we grew. Now because I myself had chosen the teaching profession; I was always contemplating on how we can make these subjects interesting and how to inculcate the knowledge by which students could understand the importance of these subjects, could relate to their daily life and don’t have to cram. I myself couldn’t do much about this and was looking for a platform where I could contribute to something of this sort and getting the education to next level. Finally, after I joined K.R.Mangalam University, after spending some time there, in April, 2018, I met Prof Dinesh Singh who is really an extraordinary personality and advocate of converting the styles of traditional education to a very modern system by incorporating many innovative ways to impart extremely practical & project based learning to the students. This type of education helps in developing the critical thinking of students by using a lot of hands on activities and once theoretical education is made project based, automatically students are involved, understand the concepts much better, try to innovate and learning happens by itself. There are now many such personalities who help us in adopting the advanced & effective ways of teaching. Prof. Krishan Lal is one of them who make us understand how Physics is related to our daily life. At each step of our life we can do something unique with the help of our knowledge in Physics.

Just to cite one example as a testimony of what I have written above, recently westarted doing one project on “How to Keep Room Cool without Electricity”. Students have been asked to develop the prototype and present. Special thing is that this project doesn’t belong to a particular stream which means it is not like students of one stream participate in the project like we see in the traditional approach. We have students from streams Physics, Chemistry, Education, Electronics& Architecture who are participating. This is a really a great platform for the students to understand their own stream by applying the concepts practically and also learn about the role of other streams while they implement this project. Now they are learning by doing; I am sure the concepts of physics, chemistry or any other stream they are using will now be fixed in their memory.They won’t need to cram big bunch of theories anymore and definitely they will enjoy the learning and will feel proud to be a student of science or any other stream for that matter.

As teachers, we are also now learning very new things beyond the bookish knowledge. Now we can say;Yes; learning is always there at each stage of life. We have learnt that all the branches of education are interrelated. We should notpressurize a child to just get marks but should help to explore the areas of his/her choice and motivate for practical learning; as at the end of the day, it is the experience which helps and if students are given chance according to their interest,and they get a nice platform as being offered in KR Mangalam University, it is sure that they can accomplish amazing and unique things. Moreover, it will give an actual meaning to the degree earned after spending a lot of time, effort & money. All the best!!!

Article Written by:
Dr. Ruby Jindal
Asst.  Prof. (SBAS_Physics)