The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has in lieu of lab work, curated a set of alternate experiments which can be easily performed at home using simple, readily available household materials for Classes IX and X for the academic year 2021-22. The circular says that with the school lockdown during the COVID pandemic, the amount of time available to teachers for face-to-face instruction has reduced in the current academic session. Further, the opportunities for hands-on teacher guided practical work for Science has also been limited.
Therefore, the CBSE has designed these hands-on activities, designed to have a similar outcomes as the lab work which are required to be done for the academic year 2021-22 for Classes IX and X. “Besides this, a list of additional activities from the NCERT lab manual for 9 (20 activities) and 10 (22 activities) are provided. Learners may use these to explore science concepts and gain better understanding. These hands-on activities are accompanied by step-by-step guides, videos and worksheets for students to record observations. A list of material needed for each experiment, together with alternatives have also been included in the content package to facilitate the learners. The content has been provided by ThinkTac and is also available on the Diksha portal.”, the notification reads.
It further says, “While the activities and materials have been chosen to be safe for learners to do on their own,
teachers are required to review these before assigning them and advise parents if supervision is
required for any specific activity. CBSE would be providing an online training on the usage of these
activities, details of which will be intimated separately.”
It is therefore clear that students of Classes IX and X will not have to visit the school to perform the lab work and will be able to conduct simple experiments related to colloids, mixtures, sublimation, distillation, pH, creation of temporary mounts to observe under a microsope etc., using materials available at home.
The official notification, the list of activities and experiments together with the video links, guides and worksheets etc., are available here.
