This paper presents two low-cost hands-on activities designed to enhance student understanding and address the pedagogical challenges faced by microbiology professors in teaching concepts related to cell structure and gene regulation. In the first activity, we used Shrinky Dinks and Jeopardy-style game questions to explore the differences between…

The unforeseen COVID-19 pandemic forced educational institutions to shift to a remote or distance-learning mode. As a result, classes were offered online, and this shift in teaching modality presented great challenges, especially in teaching laboratory courses. While several options are available, we evaluated the use of (i) videos of lab…

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education has become a focal point of global discussions in the field of education. It emphasizes an interdisciplinary approach to learning. Subjective well-being of adolescents is characterized as joy to learn, close connectedness in schools, perception of the purpose of education, and the…

Curiosity is the inner drive for learning or 'hunger for learning' which is among the twenty-first-century learning competencies. Students in their earliest stage ought to exhibit curiosity to stir up knowledge acquisition and exploration, yet the development of curiosity in the context of education is considered to be unusual. This research…

In order to help students become scientifically literate citizens, science education should allow them to gain a more concrete understanding of the potential social and ethical impacts of scientific and technological change. Using Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as an imaginative tool, we designed simple hands-on activities and a digital narrative…

The "Primary SPACE Project Research Report: Sound" (Watt and Russell, 1990) provides interesting reading relating to primary-aged children's concepts of sound. It reveals a range of children's views on how sound is made, how sounds are heard and how sound travels. While some children are shown to have knowledge that sounds travel and are…

Few laboratory exercises exist that introduce undergraduate students to both the concepts and instrumentation used in rotational spectroscopy. Because of this gap in undergraduate laboratory training, a teaching laboratory for the pure rotational spectroscopy of benzonitrile has been developed and reported. Owing to benzonitrile's recent discovery…

Learners' curiosity is among the affective domains of learning that has a great potential to take learning to higher levels and meet the demands of the 21st-century teaching and learning process. This paper assesses how hands-on activities performed using learning materials from learners' immediate environment can enhance learners' curiosity in…

Fully online courses and degree programs are popular with students today. It is important that these courses provide the same rigor and value of a traditional learning experience in a face-to-face classroom in order to ensure mastery of concepts and learning objectives. Online classes typically have suffered due to a lack of hands-on experiences…

Using Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" as inspiration, this paper presents a Frankenstein-themed transmedia storytelling experience, which encompasses simple hands-on activities and an online narrative experience that allows students to model scientific work and engage in various science activities. The study aimed to test whether students…

The global outbreak of COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) gave rise to a sudden shift to the online education delivery system from the conventional in-person teaching method. Though instructions were moved to a virtual learning platform, it was a critical challenge to provide hands-on training to teach complex engineering software. This article discusses the…

Prior to the challenges imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, anatomy practical sessions at Trinity College Dublin involved eight to 10 students per donor station, rotating between digital learning, anatomical models/osteology, and dissection activities for three hours weekly. To maintain cadaveric participation in the anatomy laboratory while…

We describe a novel experiment for high school students that uses gas chromatography (GC) equipment to demonstrate the principles of chemical quantitation in the context of fragrant compounds. A highlight of the work is the use of inexpensive equipment and tools accessible to the usual high school laboratory. The students use control samples,…

The physics that underpins modern technology is based on Einstein's theories of relativity and quantum mechanics. Most school students complete their compulsory science education without being taught any of these Einsteinian concepts. Only those who take a specialised physics course have the opportunity to learn modern physics. In 2011, the first…

The primary objective of the current project was to convey authentic science to students in out-of-school student laboratories. High school students have diverse and partially wrong concepts of scientists' work. To convey more realistic concepts, we developed videos of scientists working on relevant and up to date scientific topics. These videos,…