The physics of fufu

This is personal.

The physics of fufu

The past is a boundless realm that holds firmly rosy memories in tender and warm embrace, like a mother knows best how she holds her child. Visiting the realms of younger days, I remember vividly how I would cut a stick as tall as myself and cut a little gap at its thickest end, and then I would go hunting, hunting on the refuse for disposed flip-flops (chalewate). My efforts  when viewed by the elderly eye was perhaps defined as child’s play, but deep down in the chambers of my young heart  blazed the fires of a dream to be hatched. A dream I have nurtured for long, a dream that turns ones heart into a furnace. It was as though I was preparing for war. I would search out a spoilt metallic torch. Once I had found this also, my next stop was usually a bicycle repair shop. Over here I would look for discarded metal rods that would fit perfectly into the gap I had created earlier at the thick end of my stick, and then construction begins. I would heat the round part of my spoilt metallic torch and use it as a mold to cut out of the flip-flops, perfectly round tires. I will then place at least two of these tires at each end of my metal rod to form an axle! Cut out the base of a round paint bucket, and there was my steering wheel, nail this steering wheel onto my stick put my axle at the gap I had created and there, the finest car in the world. It required no fuel because my legs did the trick. I didn’t go anywhere without my car, whether I was sent, or I was on my way to play, I just zoomed away!

Such ingenuity, such imagination, such creativity, how delightful those days were. The world was mine for the taking. Everything was possible. I could explore, be wrong and do it over again and again. I was free to be wrong so could learn to be right. I could look over the shoulders of my friends see what they had done and add to my own. In-built, was this edge to create, to show something new I had done to my friends the next day when we met to play. My curiosity was an unquenchable thirst. Then, I went to school…

Every day, for three years I wondered what science was like in real life. I wondered what would become of my ingenuity and creativity as all that I was being thought seemed very distant from the life I had lived previously. Here my ingenuity didn’t matter; it scored me no points, my desire to create was of no use. I was judged by my ability to understand what had been created by others, but what I could create, had no place. Nevertheless I didn’t believe the men who ruled this ‘school’ kingdom – my teachers, had any bad intentions, besides all they wanted was to help me better myself by understanding the world around me but, that was the problem. I was taught these entire amazing things that blew my imagination away, but time and again it seemed those things where so far away as thought they could only exist in a land that was not real.

I was thought small particles called atoms that made up everything there was.  Tiny thighs that could breathe and reproduce just like ’me’ called cells. I was greatly fascinated by yet another unseen, I was told there were these ‘strengths’ that existed around everything. They were of the same nature but some kept things together whiles other pulled them apart, these strengths I was told were called forces. They could mold our lives by keeping things together and shatter it by throwing everything off balance. All these things where fascinating but to me there all were in a different world.

Years have passed since those days. Now I have stopped talking about it and begun to act. It was a struggle but after staff meeting to discuss ‘me’, punishments and failed papers, I managed to save a piece of my true nature after my baptism of school.

As I continued to explore my love for science and knowledge, I had the opportunity to work with friends from MIT and KNUST under the MIT Dlab project. Our task for the project was to create innovative and simple way of teaching Science to junior High and Senior High school pupils. During the performance of this task I greatly exhibited my bias at the idea of teaching science through practice (it was this bias that got me invited there in the first place) As I brainstormed (or “brainhurricaned”, because it is usually dramatic) I was looking for ways to teach the most abstract of topics and concepts in a practical way. To do this I looked for instances where these concepts were used in everyday life, then I would engineer methods of teaching where these everyday life activity were used as the tool for teaching. One of the most abstract of things I noted was the concept of ‘forces and energy ’.

To my surprise however, these two were the easiest to find around. As a matter of fact there was one activity, done every day and almost everywhere that contained everything a person would learn about forces and energy from junior High school to senior high school.  Kinetic energy, potential energy, pressure, work done, energy transformation, and power, they were all there every day when we pound fufu! All we needed to do was teach it. I thought to myself, the classroom could be the same place where we pound fufu and calculate the force used, the pressure exerted by the piston or the work done by the person pounding and I was hooked. What a wonder it would be, what a fascinating science class that would be, a class were we learn physics by pounding fufu.

POTENTIAL ENERGY

  
KINETIC ENERGY

PRESSURE

WORK DONE  

It was all so exiting I couldn’t keep it in me for long. Then, as if by faith, a week earlier I had the opportunity to speak at the annual conference of the Ghana Association of Science Teachers in Cape Coast. I presented my idea and something happened.

Never had I seen people that happy about change. It was incredible seeing how the teacher jumped at this exciting new idea, maybe it was because it brought they themselves to understand and experience these basic scientific principles like they had never before or maybe because they realized how easy and yet fascination it was. Either ways that five minutes presentation and its aftermath gave new life to my passion. Previously I had thought it would take systems, government policies, money, and facilities to transform education but that day I realized there was a much easier way.

This is my idea. I think education, is to improve the life of an individual by enabling them understand their environment so that in effect an individual can also improve his environment by their understanding. Going by this, I would say that there is a lot of another man’s world and very small of our own, in our education. What if we changed this? We teach diffusion in liquids using magnesium per oxide what if we used ‘prekese’ instead, the way its scent (the scent we love so much) diffuses in our palm nut soup- who would forget diffusion. We can develop our everyday life only if we understand it. It would therefore be a good idea that we teach and learn with what we have. The things that we now rather call local, indigenous, and traditional are the things our lives are truly made of. They are the things we want our graduates to come and improve on, if that is so, would it not be better that we teach and learn with them? The chemistry of achampong leaf and the physics of fufu.