Activity Based Learning, an effective way to learn
Sarita, aged 9 was a precocious child who simply could not understand why a square room whose side was 10 feet had an area of 100 square feet. “But why is it?” she kept asking. After several attempts at explaining, her father took a piece of chalk and marked out 10 feet by 10 feet in their living room. Their floor was tiled – with tiles of 1 foot by 1 foot. He made Sarita count them. And suddenly it was all so clear. 10 years later, Sarita still remembers this as a breakthrough – when she suddenly started to understand. Welcome to Activity Based Learning!
We have known for a while that ‘learning by doing’ is more effective than just reading about it or being taught it in a classroom. Schools that emphasize this method of learning, have kids who are better adjusted and who perform better. And it is easy to understand why that will work. Imagine being taught to drive a car through a lecture or for that matter being taught how to drive a nail with a hammer. The simplest tasks are better learned through experience.
Activities usually involve doing something physically and works best when more than one person is involved in the activity. So rolling a ball and pushing a block down a slope in a physics class to understand the concept of friction works better when one student is applying the force and the other taking notes. Discussion and having to accommodate another student’s learning approach usually enhances learning.
For younger students, activities result in a process of discovery. Watching a plant grow, putting together a geography project with animals, all of this makes learning real. By middle school, students need games and competition to remain fully engaged. By senior school, many things cannot be learned through activities – specially subjects like Mathematics that tend to become more conceptual. But even for these students an early grounding using activities helps them understand conceptual topics better.
So given the obvious benefits, why do children have to learn mostly from books and lectures? Why not add activities in classrooms? A few years ago, with this approach in mind, schools were required to have ‘Mathematics Labs’ – physical rooms designed to let children experience maths and equipped with kits to do many activities. Schools now do have these labs – though the experience is not quite what was planned.
Rajan was one of the first children to use the spanking new Maths lab in their school. He walked in with a sense of wonder. Lovely colours, tables shaped as polygons, patterns on the floor, many charts on the walls. It seemed a different world. He and his other classmates seated themselves and waited expectantly for some fun. Veena Ma’am his teacher came in and started explaining a Maths concept using the board. Rajan waited for her to use the beautiful shapes and blocks to explain things – and let him play with them. 4 classes later, he is still waiting. The Maths Lab turns out to be just another classroom.
The reasons for not using Activity Based Learning range from inadequate teacher training, insufficient numbers of kits, too many kids in a class and so on. But the idea is right. Children will learn better if they are able to do activities around concepts.
At SecondSchool, we use an enhanced approach to activity based learning. Rather than create a set of tools that need to be used by the teacher and perhaps shared by a few students, we provide all our students with their very own Maths kit. So when a teacher needs to do an activity, every student already has the required kit.
Not all activities can be physical. For example, to understand that the angles of a triangle must be 180 degrees, providing multiple triangles and asking students to measure them, gets the point across to an extent but only proves that the specific triangles given total 180 degrees. On the other hand a computer based activity allowing the teacher to increase or decrease any angle, and along with that showing the size of the other two angles, makes the point perfectly. At SecondSchool, in addition to each student having an activity kit, we use computer-based activities. Students engage here through games and through interaction.
For parents who want their children to learn using activities, the internet is a wonderful source of projects and assignments. Do these activities with your children – in fact get them to invite their friends when you do some of them. You will find that they look forward to these sessions. And their understanding will improve dramatically, as will their school performance.
* This article has been written by Second School (www.secondschool.in) as a part of its endeavour to spread awareness in the areas of Maths, Curriculum and Standards. Second School is committed to providing school going children with whole brain learning through neighborhood tuition centers.
