Electricity workshop held in Ghana

24 August 2012

Thirty teachers attended the three day workshop 17- 19 July at the IOP Ada Centre in Ghana.

The course tutors were Denis Kuszynski and Roger Green IOP international volunteers for Ghana along with William Ankorah the newly appointed coordinator for the IOP Ada Centre.  

The IOP certificates of attendance were presented by Professor Allotey President of the IOP in Ghana and newly elected Honorary Fellow of the IOP. 

All the teachers were from the local area and were a mixture of primary, junior and senior high school.  The course was praised by the teachers in their report - “we are indeed impressed about the workshop …. and pray that it will be organised on a regular basis.” 

We made good use of Joe Brock’s  ‘Teaching practical physics anywhere’ and ‘Teaching electricity anywhere’ published by the IOP.

The photos in this report show the range of activities from electrical circuits to the physics of bikes.  

The equipment used was simple e.g. mobile phones  have 1/100s timers and the investigations were straight forward. Nonetheless we were able to plot graphs and discuss graph shapes and use equations. 

Every afternoon we were given an opportunity to teach science students from Ada Secondary High School.  

There were around 70 students in each group nonetheless we were able to demonstrate that even with classes of this size practical work on Archimedes Principle and circuit electricity  is possible. 

Report by: Denis Kuszynski and Roger Green IOP International Coordinators for Ghana