Simplifying Science

Science as a subject of choice is still taken as a hardest and students still go for it with their aim to become a doctor, or an engineer. These professions are something like a trademark for many students who would like to study science. Even though there are other promising subjects to be chosen in science, discussion about them is not an objective of this article. Opting for any subjects should be more based not on grades or marks scored in your high school. Science, even though, is taken as very hard subject, it can be learned in a very simple and and beautiful way if we know how it works. The main reason of this write up is to assist science aspirants on simplified and more beautiful way of learning science.

Play with nature, ask questions and get answers

As our learning techniques, we are so much into books that we often forget the beauty of nature. Science is more to do with understanding nature. For example, right from primary to high school level, we draw picture of flowers and its different parts like petals, sepals, ovary, stigma, anther etc. However, as I recall, I never looked into those flowers around my house. Later I realized, it is so much easy to understand the structure of flowers when we actually pluck a flower from few trees and compare them up. It may also be about structure of leaves, roots, and stems. We would also appreciate that many lessons we are taught in schools from primary to higher secondary schools are based on nature, natural processes and phenomena such as pollination and fertilization in flowers, rocks, physical characteristics of plants and animals (plant and animal kingdom lessons). It would simply be so easy to come out of the classrooms and observe them up. It applies to rocks, types of soils, mountains, plateau, rivers, stones, and landslides too. We could also observe land, water and pond ecosystem, probably observing nearby ponds from school. It would probably be a bit of fun as well.  We could observe life cycle of mushroom, gymnosperms, fern etc. by ourselves as well looking at our own kitchen gardens or in our own farms, which many students find it difficult to learn. We can apply these simple observations to types of soil, adaptational features, ecosystems, germination, vegetative propagation, fertilization, chemicals, etc. We probably wouldn’t forget the biology and science behind what we learn in school when we carry our live study on them.

Experiment with local resources

Many government schools of Nepal are in poor conditions. Building a good science laboratory still seems a distant dream to a greater extent for many schools. We still have a large number of high schools where no science experiments are conducted. However, practical marks (25 marks out of full marks 100) are granted without any experiments conducted in schools. There are many possibilities of using local resources for carrying out some important experiments based on our course of studies up to high school levels. For examples, we can produce soap using vegetable oil, which do need an alkali. We can experiment PH of soil using normal PH test using litmus paper, which actually is not expensive. We can still buy a magnesium ribbon (that would cost few rupees) and show how oxygen reacts with magnesium showing bright flames. In my high school, we read this reaction but never got a chance to observe it. Later I realized, it was such a nominal activity probably few students could collect their range of pocket money to do this fun-filled experiment.  Similarly, we can see a beautiful volcanic eruption at no cost involved using baking soda, detergent and vinegar. We could also make plastic using 1 teaspoon of laundry borax and a tablespoon of white glue (food colour could be used to give it colour). All these above-mentioned experiments are part of the high school course in Nepal and can be carried out using our own local resources.

Doing a bit complex experiments at no cost

This probably will be good at least to high school students. I actually learnt concept of DNA extraction practically while doing my masters level. Now, I understand, we could do the similar experiments at no cost in school. What we need is any plant to extract DNA (such as ripened kiwi or strawberry), alcohol, detergent (soap) and salt. We could also extract DNA from other plants such as onions, broccoli, green peas etc. There are simply four simple steps: smash them, mix them with soap and salt, filter the mixture and mix with alcohol. The beautiful strands of DNA will be floated.  This method of extraction could be a very good experiment in undergraduate biology classes in Nepal. Similarly, we could use onion or garlic to study cell division in plants. Cell division, is one of the hardest chapter, I found as a student myself and as a teacher to make student understand. However, this experiment needs Hydrochloric acids, toluidine blue, microscope, and beakers, thermometer and some microscopic slides. It is a bit more complex than extracting DNA but can be easily carried out in the laboratory with hardly any cost provided that these few things mentioned are available already.

Easy way of building theoretical concepts in science

In a country like Nepal, where we still put more focus on theory and our evaluation system is more based on written examinations, we need to memorise a large chunk of lectures notes, and books’ paragraphs. One way of remembering those notes is to carry out vertical and horizontal comparisons of what we have learnt before. We often tend to forget and even escape from what we have learnt in previous years. If we see our course, we have seen the similarity in lessons right from primary level, lets say grade 3 to high school level. For example, we learnt name of the planets, including the largest, smallest, nearest and farthest planets in grade three. These also forms a part of SLC examination questions. Surprisingly, there are still students making mistakes on these simple concepts. The reason is that we keep on neglecting what we have learnt in previous years. Vertical comparison is to compare what we learnt in previous years to what we are learning at present. In science, almost all the chapters are evolved from previous year’s lessons. For example, various human-body systems astronomy, simple machines, work energy and power, electricity and magnetism and many other lessons are taught right from lower secondary school to high school level. Only one difference is that these lessons get more complex as we move to a higher level. Recalling what we learnt in previous year before related to the chapter we are about to learn in higher year make things far easier and helps us to make our concept more clear. Similarly, there are many related lessons in the same sand different subjects. Health Population and Environment (HPE) have few common subtopics related to science. While learning those topics from HPE, it makes a good sense to compare them to science and vice versa will be highly beneficial. This is called a horizontal comparison. Similarly, in physics, we learn about nuclear fusion and nuclear fission as a part of nuclear energy, which is a part of another chapter on thermonuclear reaction on sun. This concept of fission and fusion is similar on biology while learning types of vegetative propagation when we learn fission in protozoa as an example. Structure of ethene in organic compound will help us to understand structure of polythene while learning plastics. There are other dozens of examples where vertical and horizontal comparisons of what we have learnt before would help us to learn related topics more easily.

Finally, studying science is more than a fun and will be no longer harder if right approach of teaching and learning is applied.