The capacity building workshop on “Expanding Girls horizon in Science” was conducted especially for
High School teachers, to foster the spirit of scientific enquiry in high school students, in order to
encourage and motivate high school girls to pursue their education in the science stream.
The workshop was conducted across 3 days from 9 th to 11 th July 2024, at the Guindy campus of the
University of Madras. Dr. Rita John, the Head of the Department of Theoretical Physics, was the
main convenor of this workshop. The first day of the workshop emphasized the need to adopt
curiosity driven teaching-learning methods and to make the subject more interesting, in order to
keep students engaged in class room learning. Dr. Thenmozhi, the Head of the department of
Counselling Psychology, spoke at length about the emotional needs of high school students, and the
strategies that teachers need to adopt to make learning more engaging and stimulating for them.
The sessions on the second day included “Nuts and bolts of Basic Math” by Dr. Hemalatha, “Water
resource management” by Dr. Bhaskaran. The post lunch session included visits to various
departments like Endocrinology, pathology, microbiology anatomy etc. The sessions on the third day
were conducted by Dr. Nedumaran, head of Instrumentation centre, on “Integration of Science,
engineering, technology for medical diagnosis”, and “Semiconductor chips- the device behind
electronics, robotics and AI”, by Dr. Balaji. The last session of the workshop was conducted by Dr.
Rita John on proposal writing for project funding.
The sessions were interesting and engaging and gave us an insight into the kind of research being
carried out by scientists at the Madras University.