Inspirational training

Primary school science teachers attend a five-day course that offers new methods and access to resources to help them spark the imagination of their students, Xing Wen reports.

Demonstrating magnetic fields using iron filings

is a simple and classic method to learn about magnets.

Basically, it requires sprinkling the iron filings on a piece of light-colored paper on a flat surface and the using the magnet to manipulate them. Like a murmuration of starlings, the filings follow the magnet around the paper, providing an effective visual demonstration.

Unfortunately, the aforementioned method is not ideal, nor portable enough, for a teacher to show the whole class at the same time.

That might have once been an annoying problem for Guo Haifen, 23, a primary school science teacher in Meizhou, Guangdong province.

However, after she attended a recent five-day training course for primary school science teachers, it's no longer a problem.

There, the novice educator was impressed by an experienced science teacher's visual exploration of magnetic fields.

"The teacher took a glass bottle which contains a mix of paraffin oil and iron filings. A long test tube was then positioned in the middle of the container. After he put a bar magnet into the tube, the iron filings started to move and form directional lines of the magnetic field, three-dimensionally," she recalls.

"It was such a clever solution. I've been inspired to use simple tools to make practical teaching aids on my own."

The training course, which ran between Feb 6 and 10, gathered 50 primary school science teachers from Guangdong province's Shenzhen and Meizhou to share their respective experiences in delivering science class, visit labs with the latest equipment, follow established scientists in conducting experiments and listen to their lectures on such cutting-edge topics as neurology, robotics, synthetic biology and the metaverse.