Say "scientific experimentation" and immediately the image of a researcher in lab whites comes to the mind.The popular view is that serious scientific and engineering teaching and research require dedicated laboratory facilities. The equipment contained in such labs is generally expensive and thus, in developing countries, at the primary school level they are a rarity; at the secondary school level, there is a serious paucity and even at the tertiary level there are shortcomings.
So does this mean that students of such countries will continue to be at a disadvantage? In the past when information was to be found in books and libraries, only a few had access to it.This situation has changed dramatically with the advent of computers and the vast array of sources of information available through the Internet.
This opening up or democratisation of information has resulted in people, laymen and doctoral researchers alike, being able to conduct literature searches from their home or office or sitting in the picnic park. The physical walls that enclosed educational institutions and thus regulated access to their facilities have given way to cyber doorways that allow for easy access. In fact, the explosive growth in online education can be viewed as a diffusion of education throughout society.
An integral and essential component of scientific and technical education is experimentation. Can this aspect also keep pace with the changes in information delivery and allow students to acquire the requisite skills at home? The reflexive answer might be "no" as it is assumed that expensive, sophisticated equipment is necessary. This is not quite true.
If history is to be believed, the concept of gravity and the laws of motion attributed to Sir Isaac Newton had their beginning when he sat under an apple tree and an apple fell on his head.
The philosophically inclined may muse on the idea that such a trivial event, an apple falling, played such a critical role in sending rockets to outer space and other planetary bodies! The idea of the buoyancy of fluids (liquids and gases) came to Archimedes; it was archived while he was having his bath. This principle is used to design airplanes and ships.
The above listed fundamental principles of mechanical, aeronautical and maritime engineering were not discovered in laboratories but rather in domestic environments. In the home, experiments can be easily conducted by students to understand and reinforce scientific and engineering principles.
As a doctoral student, in order to understand the very complex mathematics involved in the determination of the shaded area in solar collectors as the sun moves from both the daily east to west and the yearly north to south, I used a cardboard shoe box placed in the veranda of my parent's home.
In primary school, the experiment to demonstrate germination and the effect of sunlight was done at home, the equipment and supplies being a glass jar, paper, water and a red bean.
Recently, to solve the issue of allowing a part-time year-one engineering class of over 120 to conduct experiments to determine the potential energy storage capacity of torsional springs, a simple experiment was designed and successfully completed at the students' homes, using rubber bands, a standard kitchen scale, a ruler and other items found around the house.
The results of this experiment were used to predict the flight of model airplanes. The essential point is that a lot of experimentation and learning of fundamental and complex scientific principles can be done in the home environment to complement the digital home-based learning using computers which most students now possess and that obtained at the educational institutions themselves.
This approach will impact significantly over the medium and long term in producing inventors, innovators, scientists and engineers so necessary for growing the economy.
