Physics Workshop FROM HANDS ON TO MINDS ON- Physics workshop, 7 September, 2012

The workshop on the theme, Expriment -based teaching of Mechanics was hosted by Birla Vidya Niketan in collaboration with IIT Kanpur and IAPT (Indian Association of Physics teachers). It was conducted by the distinguished Dr. H. C. Verma, Prof. of Physics, IIT Kanpur. About Anveshika Anveshika is the vision of IAPT. It is a revolutionary lab open to students and teachers of any school where they can experience an excitement of physics which is often missing in classrooms.It is aimed at professionally training teachers to make the teaching of physics more appealing.Today, 17 Anveshikas have been set up in different schools all over India. They work with the message, pehle dikhao, phir sikhao. A brief presentation was made by Dr. H. C. Verma where he emphasized upon the revitalization of physics. He said that todays process of learning is unnatural. We have an educational machine in which students are treated as raw material and everyone is interested in the final product (result). So, if the student is not performing well, he gets discarded from the system. So, it's time to make this process of learning natural and discovery- based. As teachers, we have to be creative and innovative and should facilitate the child to want to learn. We should not encourage how to answer questions but how to ask questions, he explained. Various concepts were explained using simple activities and low- cost apparatus. For example, the centre of mass of a body was explained by holding a heavy bag with a scale and then the position of bag was changed to see the shift in the center of mass. Similarly, it can also be explained by using a CD on whose one side, cloth clips are attached, to shift the centre of mass. The motion of the centre of mass and it's direction was determined by smearing ink on the centre of mass and then flipping the CD in one direction. Another concept, angular momentum was explained using the wheel of a bicycle. Another interesting activity was based on the concept of weightlessness which was explained using 2 magnets that were taken in a small cylindrical box. One of them was fixed to the lid of the box and another was kept in the box. When the box was dropped from a height, a sound of magnets touching each other could be heard before touching the ground. One of the difficult topics of mechanics, centrifugal force, was explained using a toy merry- go- round;resonance was explained using a common milk container. Filed by Ms. Shweta Aggarwal, senior Physics teacher.