Students laud UWI Physics workshop

BY PETRE WILLIAMS Environment editor williamsp@jamaicaobserver.com

Sunday, January 25, 2009

KARIM Lyn was one of 900 students from 24 Jamaican high schools to benefit from the recently staged annual CAPE Physics workshop of the University of the West Indies (UWI) Department of Physics.

Like many of his colleagues, 17-year-old Lyn had high praise for the January 12-16 workshop.

"I can understand what the teacher is saying. It's very simple," said Lyn, a student of Glenmuir High School.

Simone Silvera shared his sentiment of the workshop, which offered three hours of lecture in the mornings and another three hours of practical lab work in the afternoons.

"I'm finding it interesting. I get to understand the concepts and it is practical," said the 16-year-old student of Immaculate Conception High, who admits to being a lover of Physics and the sciences generally.

They were not alone in their opinion of the workshop, which has been held over the past four years.

"It is very interesting, the information given. And the teacher is a very interesting person," Thioluja Reid, 17, who intends to study engineering or medicine, told Career & Education.

Dr Michael Ponnambalam, co-ordinator for the Physics Outreach Programme of which the workshop forms a part, is ecstatic about the responses from the students over the years.

He recalled that the first year it was held, they had 210 students and only seven computers. Today, the number of students has grown, as has the number of computers they have to work with - 24.

"This has been the most successful in terms of tangible results and not in terms of what people say," he said, referring to the Physics Outreach Programme.

Students this year paid $800 to participate in the workshop, which was designed to educate them on fundamental Physics concepts, while helping to cultivate their love and appreciation for the subject area.

The morning sessions had two lectures, each lasting 90 minutes, with a 30-minute break. The lab work done later saw them doing two experiments - one of them was hands-on and the other, a simulation.

With the workshop at an end, students will now write an experimental report, which will be graded by their respective schoolteachers and the results submitted for their school-based assessments.

Meanwhile, the Physics Outreach programme also entails school visits and demonstrations.

In addition, there are plans to have a physics van that goes to rural Jamaica to assist children from those areas.

"I am from a rural area and I have a social concern for Jamaicans in rural areas," said Ponnambalam, who is from India. "We would like to go there with this van to spend two hours with the little ones there - grades four, five and six. They will enjoy it immensely."

Ponnambalam, also a senior lecturer in the Department of Physics, said that the workshop was established precisely for this reason. He noted that Physics, like the other sciences, was critical to Jamaica attaining developed world status.

"We believe that Jamaica needs Physics; science in general and Physics in particular, if it wants to move on to a first-world status," he said. "Without Physics, it cannot be a first-world nation, irrespective of how much money you make."

He said that could be tackled through efforts like that at the UWI Physics Department.

"Research has shown that our Jamaican youngsters are as smart as anyone else," he said. "They are as curious, as brainy as anybody else. But something seems to happen to quite a few of them by the time they come to form three (in high school); they hate Maths and Physics. They think science is hard and that Physics in particular is very hard and very boring. They think it is not for us but for the Americans and the Canadians. We must get rid of this brainwash, which is having a very nasty effect on this country."

That nasty effect, Ponnambalam explained, has been a decline in the number of students studying Physics up to the university level.

However, since the workshop began four years ago, the number of students studying first-year Physics, certainly at the UWI, has increased.

"We had just a bit over 100 before the programme began. Two years ago it went to 130 or so. And the current year, we thank God we have 226 students - first-year Physics - that we are keeping track of. A few of them have taken part (in the workshop)," he said.

Click for a link to the original online article