Sowmya Prabhakar
I am Sowmya Prabhakar, a parent facilitator at Samvida, a community of homeschoolers. We used the 6th grade Xperimentor kit. At Samvidaa we believe the best way to learn Science is to involve students in activities that enable each of them to rediscover the science concepts. Through activities we also aim at developing the knowledge and skills required to understand the concepts as well as the process of Science. However, for the past two years, due to the pandemic we could not implement active learning Science sessions effectively. As most of the classes were online, we had to resort to teaching Science rather than engaging them in meaningful hands-on activities. This was when we came across Xperimentor, which proved to be a good solution for the problem.
Initially when we were deciding on whether or not to use Xperimentor for our children, the first thing that interested us was that, not only do they provide content on an app but also provide every child with the materials required to perform the activities. This matched our requirements very well as we were working completely remotely through online classes. We also went through the content of every chapter to understand the approach adopted to deliver a concept.
Each chapter is divided into quests and every quest starts with a question for which the children find out the answer. The content has many leading questions where children are asked to predict outcomes and then they do the activities or experiments using the lab kit, record their observations, test if their predictions are right or wrong and finally they conclude their findings. This way, they don’t teach the concepts but allow children to rediscover the concepts and have their own “Eureka” moment.
The materials that are used are child friendly , easy to use and very attractive. Certain chapters related to environmental sciences, like Air around us, often do not render themselves to a lot of experiments. In such cases good videos, fascinating facts and case studies are provided to enable good insight into the topics.
For every chapter, they also provide a Teacher’s guide, which helped me a lot personally. The Teacher’s guide gives an overview of the objectives and the prerequisites of the quests . It also has a section, wherein certain questions that could be asked by students are provided. This helped me a lot while preparing for the topic and sometimes helped me set-up a premise for the session as well.
The activities are designed in such a way that it naturally kindles children’s curiosity and their innate nature to explore. To add to this I would like to share one of my experiences. I was teaching a 6th grade level chapter “Electric Circuits” to my 11 year old students. The session started with an introduction and children were asked to build a simple circuit. After the children performed the quests, I was flooded with a lot of questions. The objective of the quest was to understand the parts of an electric circuit and open and closed circuits. But I received a plethora of questions like – Why can’t we simply connect one battery with the bulb instead of two batteries? Does electricity pass in a straight line? How do the wires pass the current through them and help the current travel from the battery to the light source? and many more. In subsequent quests, children used the materials in the classroom to try out many combinations of circuit elements. Children tried connecting the switch in parallel to the bulb and observed that when the switch is in ON position, the bulb is OFF. They had also tried connecting components in parallel and series and asked why the bulb glows dimmer when it is connected with the fan? And so on. The discussions in the classroom notched up to another level and the freedom to independently work with the materials gave a lot of scope for the children to go beyond intended learning outcomes.
I am very happy that children could learn the concepts well and the joy that they reap out of it is immeasurable. We are all looking forward to trying out the grade 7 solution.
Thank you TEAM XPERIMENTOR!