Abstract

Identifying the best teaching method remains a challenge for contemporary educationists. The desire to seek out more effective and efficient ways of teaching continues to drive researchers towards finding ways of integrating engineering design techniques with productive teaching methods. In particular, the teaching of certain topics in physics has been identified to require teaching techniques that would so deal with the subject as to make it both interesting and instructive for students. Generally, students tend to be scared of science subjects because these appear somewhat abstract to the learner. There is, therefore, need to design tools that will make some of these subjects less abstract and easily comprehensible to students. In this paper, we present the design and construction of a Dynamics Teaching Aid that makes teaching and learning of dynamics in secondary schools rather easy and interesting for both teacher and student by exploring the advantage of visual learning. This apparatus presents certain advantages in our local teaching environment as it does not require rigorous training to be used by teachers; can be easily mass- produced for local use at highly reduced cost and does not depend only on public electric power supply for its operation. Its precision in explaining the physical concept of certain quantities in dynamics such as velocity and acceleration marks the hallmark of our design concept.