Difficulty in comprehending science lessons in schools hence poor performance has motivated a group of students from Ronald Ngala Memorial Secondary school in Kilifi North Sub County, Kilifi County to develop science teaching aids.
The two innovations, namely Elewa Sayansi Teaching aid and the Study Buddy Gadget have been touted as tools that will help students love sciences and record impressive results in national examinations.
In the first innovation, Fatma Bindo and Glory Menza, both form four students, came up with the Elewa Sayansi Teaching aid that is capable of teaching four science topics from form one to form four.
The topics include cells and symbols circuit in form one, current electricity 1 in form 1, current electricity 2 in form three and main electricity in form four.
“The gadget makes science topics easy to comprehend and we introduced it so that we can improve performance in sciences, especially physics. This is an approved model that has introduced practical lessons that were not initially in place,” said Fatma.
To come up with the programme, the students invested in solar panels, bulbs, cables, inverters and other electronic appliances.
Glory said that the project took them six months to assemble due to costs involved but the school management enabled them to cover the costs.
“It took us six months to come up with this project because of the costs involved and also experiments. We thank our principal for providing the funds to enable the project to succeed,” she said.
In the other innovation, Valentine Mwangura, a form three student and her form four counterpart Bensufa Isaiah came up with the Study buddy gadget 23 that involves feeding the gadget with science and mathematics teaching materials in song form to help students easily grasp and memorize concepts.
“We used locally assembled materials like jericans, belts, speakers, batteries and other electronics. It is very portable and we observed that most students lack interest in mathematics and because music is loved by many teenagers, we decided to come up with this model so that they can use it to trigger their memories,” said Valentine.
Besnsufa said the appliance can be used by both teachers and students.
The learners can compose songs and poems in physics, mathematics, biology and chemistry and later listen to them using the study buddy music system.
Teachers can also teach learners by singing to them in class using the gadgets and if formally approved, the gadgets can be sold out to parents so that they can help their children grasp science languages.
Science teachers at the school, Florence Karisa and Simon Momanyi said that students are very innovative and it is through their push that they were given a chance to prove their capabilities.
“One of the areas we identified is the problem of poor performance in mathematics and sciences and the students in the science club came up with the Study Buddy Gadget 23 which allows learners to compose songs in areas that are very difficult for them and listen to them as they also get entertained,” said Florence.
Mr Momanyi said that the students approached him with the idea of coming up with a simple and cheaper teaching aid.
“They gave me a write up and then developed the teaching aid which we used to assemble the Elewa Science Teaching aid to be used in teaching for physics topics,” he said.
The students and teachers are now calling on the ministry of education to approve and adopt the new technologies and also improve them so that they can be incorporated among teaching aids in Kenya.
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