Demonstration Experiments- A Novel Pathway to Better Understanding of Physics in the Classroom

This paper is an attempt to highlight the usefulness of demonstrations in classroom situations and the author asserts that creative Physics teaching can be made a reality with the use of simple and easy to fabricate demonstrations. Physics is one of the most exciting and useful branches of natural sciences. It is both elegant and exciting, and that is the reason why one must learn Physics. We hardly need the salesmanship of several applied areas to sell basic physics. Knowledge by itself has great value and if that knowledge is unifying, full of beauty, elegance, charm and excitement, then it is certainly worth pursuing. But for a long period of time, the teaching-learning of this novel subject in most of our schools and colleges has been far from satisfactory. Pedagogically, it has been made very mechanical and bookish and full of mathematical abstractions with the consequence that the new generation hardly finds the subject attractive and challenging for making it (Physics) a passion for its intellectual development. The author, with his experience of handling the young generation of physics learners for over two decades in one of the most educationally advanced cities of India, points out the inherent flaw in our lecture dominated classrooms and emphasizes that with the use of simple low cost-no cost demonstrations relevant to the topic being presented in our day to day interactions with students, the situation can be reversed. Simple experiments and demonstrations like those related with Newton's third law, surface tension, moment of inertia, conservation of angular momentum, eddy currents, series and parallel combination of resisters, Bernoulli's principle, Archimedes’ principle, rectilinear propagation of light etc. can bring the excitement and joy of understanding physics to a majority of students in the classroom. The author in this paper cites many examples which he himself has assembled/ compiled/ developed and used among his undergraduate students as well as the numerous teachers training workshops conducted throughout the northern part of the country. The author, after highlighting the achievements of Anveshika/Exploratory Projects of the IAPT, Shiksha Sopan, Eklabya, Lok Jumbish etc., concludes that these demonstration experiments must form an integral part of Physics Teachers Training and Orientation programmes at national level in order to bring back the joy of Physics teaching learning as well as the scientific upliftment of the country in general.