About Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya

Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya (KGBV) in Pakur, Jharkhand, is a government-funded residential school providing quality education to underprivileged girls. Located in the rural heartland of Jharkhand, this school is committed to uplifting the educational standards of its students, ensuring they receive the same opportunities as those in more urban settings. Despite limited resources and infrastructure challenges, the school strives to deliver an engaging and comprehensive learning experience.

What is a Mini Science Lab?

Mini science labs offer a practical and economical solution for schools like KGBV that face budgetary constraints. These labs are designed to be compact and efficient, requiring less space and fewer resources than traditional laboratories. By eliminating the need for large, specialized facilities, schools can significantly reduce construction and maintenance costs.

It includes essential scientific instruments and equipment that allow students to perform a variety of science experiments, fostering hands-on learning in science subjects.

Benefits of a Mini Science Lab

1. Teaching Convenience

Unlike a traditional lab, which may require substantial space and specialised infrastructure, a mini science lab can be set up in a standard classroom. 

This flexibility allows teachers to seamlessly integrate practical experiments into their regular teaching schedule without the need to move students to a different location.

2. Cost-Effective

Mini science labs offer a practical and economical solution for schools like KGBV that face budgetary constraints. These labs are designed to be compact and efficient, requiring less space and fewer resources than traditional laboratories. 

By eliminating the need for large, specialized facilities, schools can significantly reduce construction and maintenance costs.

Additionally, mini-science labs often utilize repurposed materials or low-cost alternatives for equipment, further minimizing expenses. This affordability allows schools to provide students with valuable hands-on learning experiences without breaking the bank.

3. Engagement and Accessibility

The mini science lab enhances the way students engage with science. By bringing the laboratory experience directly to them, it makes practical learning more accessible and interactive. This is especially valuable in schools where limited space or resources might otherwise hinder hands-on experimentation. 

With a mini science lab, students can conduct experiments more frequently and independently, fostering a deeper understanding of scientific concepts.

4. Versatility

Mini science labs are designed to be adaptable and versatile, including a wide range of scientific disciplines. Equipped with multi-purpose tools and equipment, these mini science labs can support experiments in biology, chemistry, and physics. 

This versatility enables students to explore various scientific concepts and develop a well-rounded understanding of the natural world. By breaking down the barriers between traditionally separate subjects, mini labs foster interdisciplinary learning and encourage students to see connections between different scientific fields.

The Results

The introduction of the mini science lab at Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya was met with overwhelming enthusiasm. The teachers were thrilled to see a variety of teaching aids, ranging from microscopes to interactive models, that would significantly enhance their ability to explain complex science concepts. This setup promises to make teaching not only easier but also more effective, enabling teachers to bring textbook theories to life.

The students were equally excited. The entire setup fascinated them, sparking curiosity and a newfound eagerness to participate in lab sessions. Practical learning was never such fun for them, and they eagerly anticipated their first hands-on experiments in the new lab.

Impact of Mini Science Lab on Learning

The feedback from the teachers was overwhelmingly positive. They expressed confidence that this new setup would transform lab sessions into more engaging and interactive experiences. The mini science lab is expected to foster a deeper understanding of scientific concepts among students, making learning more immersive and enjoyable.

In conclusion, the mini science lab at Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya is not just a project but a significant step towards enhancing educational opportunities for underprivileged girls in Pakur, Jharkhand. By providing a practical and engaging learning environment, this initiative is helping to bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and real-world application, ensuring that students are better prepared for future academic pursuits.

Contact our team of experts for a Free Mini Science Lab Setup Consultation.

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1. Count Your Chickens.

I mean, count your students! How many users will you have in each lab working together at one time? This number will heavily influence most of your procurement decisions later as this will determine the quantity of lab equipment you are going to need. 

As per CBSE/ICSE bye-laws, you need to provide for at least 30 students in a practical classroom at a time. In other words, your lab has to be big enough and have enough furniture and equipment to let 30 students and one teacher or instructor work. 

You can increase this number as much as you wish, but do keep in mind that the larger a group becomes the harder it gets to manage those people. Imagine having a hundred students in a class ‒ would you like to take that period? Labkafe recommends that you keep your lab capacity under 45. 

2. Good things come in packs.

Obviously, you have to figure out what you want to buy before you buy it, but it gets more difficult with school lab supplies. Solely for the reason that there are so many of these things! You have your laboratory equipment, apparatus, glassware, support items, machines, chemicals, consumables, safety equipment ‒ and each of these has literally hundreds of different little products you are going to need just if you want to barely meet your affiliation requirements.

So, what’s the solution? One good way to overcome this problem is to look for lab equipment suppliers who provide lab packages. Best if they provide per-affiliation packages ‒ if not, at least look for a vendor with per-experiment packages. Affiliation packages are of course the best since they cover your full syllabus and meet your board’s affiliation requirements cleanly as well. Better if they let you customize the packages as well ‒ you’ll need some personalization, you’ll see.

3. Careful with upgrades.

If you are renovating your laboratory and not building a new one, choosing equipment for it gets trickier. Your existing facility has some equipment and you will need some others, and maybe add equipment for some entirely new procedures. To do this, you will have to build a full list of lab equipment that you’ll need. 

Your lab teacher or lab instructor would be able to help you out most about this. But it still is a painstaking and long process for them. Make it easier by connecting with a proper lab consultant. They will do a free site visit and list out what you need according to what you want to do. 

4. No need to dirty your hands.

When crates of lab equipment arrive at your doorstep, the next headache you have is to unpack and fit them into where they should go. This is a tedious and thankless process nobody enjoys doing. And most lab suppliers would just drop the boxes and walk away ‒ thinking their responsibility finishes with the delivery. That’s not right at all.

So, when you choose a lab item supplier, insist upon free unboxing and free installation. A good school lab supplies vendor should be happy to comply. A REALLY good supplier would actually come forward and give you free demonstrations of a few procedures as well! Granted, there aren’t many of them out there.

5. Shiny doesn’t mean gold.

You are spending beaucoup bucks for your student’s future, so why would you want to compromise on quality? Just because some stuff is available on the market does not mean they will give you results on the lab table ‒ you probably know this already. Nobody would want to compromise their student’s performance due to poor equipment and consumable quality.

So instead, insist on sticking to quality certified lab equipment manufacturing companies. ISO is a must since it’s an international standard and doesn’t come easily. BIS is nearly mandatory for Indian technical manufacturers these days, as well. For other certifications, look for important quality control stamps like NABL and SEFA. A laboratory supplier with all of these certifications is indeed a formidable ally!

6. Look for a friend.

The process of procuring laboratory items is perhaps one of the most boring and complex jobs school and college principals have to go through. It is a crappy job for the procurement officer too. There is order copy preparation, tender process, bids handling, technical conformation, purchase documentation, and whatever not! And if you have to procure from GeM ‒ oh man, that’s a whole different can of worms!

Look for a company that understands your pain points and wants to help you. There certainly are very few in the education manufacturing industry, but there are some. A good company caring for their customers will hand-hold you throughout the entire procurement process and help you get every documentation done. 

7. Transparency is best.

Sadly, very few manufacturing companies understand the importance of that statement. They separate the customer from the manufacturing or even operations process, and thereby frustrate the customer most annoyingly. Also, it raises the questions of reliability and security.

Don’t fall for words like “you want results, what’s the point of looking for details!” That kind of attitude only indicates that the person has something to hide. A lab equipment supplier who is fully transparent about its sales and operations processes is a real gem to find, and is a pleasure to work with. 

8. Stick to your needs.

One of the major problems with equipment suppliers is that they often try to force their own standards upon the customers. It is hard to find many options with a lab equipment reseller, especially one who agrees with your standards. 

This should not be the case. A customer should not have to change his or her standards just because the supplier doesn’t keep good stock. Instead, look for actual lab equipment manufacturers with a lot of flexibility. How would you know? A flexible seller will listen to you first before listing out his wares. And they will always keep options open for you. Why compromise on your dream laboratory? 

With these in mind…

Building a laboratory is no small task and one has to labor to get things just right. Compromising on the quality of practical education is no longer an option in our fast-developing country, as most first-world countries now prefer hands-on learning over textbooks. Therefore, now it is more important than ever to build your labs properly and renovate existing ones to match the fast-paced future that’s almost upon us.

Keeping that in the equation, we can easily say that finding a good lab equipment supplier becomes one of your priorities these days, which ticks all the boxes as mentioned above. Not to beat our own drums, but Labkafe does conform to all of these standards and then some. Not for nothing have we 1500+ satisfied customers across India and beyond! 

Image courtesy: pexels

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Done properly, a good teacher evaluation system will help the educator immensely in tracking their school’s performance and knowing exactly what changes are needed to improve and which practices to weed out. An opportunity for genuine professional learning, teacher evaluation strategies should be established around functionally tried, tested, and accepted best practices and standards of education.

Why do you need teacher evaluation methods

Teacher assessment helps both teachers and students, and thereby helps the authorities. It can be student-focused, linked to classroom performance, and observing the teachers themselves. The teachers get a good strong understanding of the school’s mission and vision from these appraisals. Depending upon their performance, you can direct them to engage in professional learning programs that they can take up to upgrade their skills and expertise. Not to mention, regular assessments increase personal performance.

With students, it is even more beneficial. First of all, you get to see exactly what they are learning and how it is impacting their cognitive abilities. Secondly, you can feel the pulse of the school from these teacher evaluations ‒ how the class as a whole feels about a teacher, if they are being treated fairly, and if the teacher is being valuable and exemplary to them at all.

For the school management, teacher evaluation systems grant a veritable boon, with multiple facets to benefit from. Such as:

1. Stakeholders can identify and solve institutional issues better by tracking performance levels in the school.
2. School leaders will be better equipped to identify teacher traits and capabilities and therefore can make better decisions about assigning duties and positions.
3. In line with the above, it enables you to reward teachers who perform well and reprimand those who don’t (or replace them if required).
4. This will enable you to identify gaps in between teaching and learning, which is one of the leading causes of poor student performance. 
5. Data is always valuable and teacher evaluation gives you valuable data about various metrics of performance in your school.

Teacher Evaluation Criteria

How to evaluate the teachers’ performance has always been a big question among education industry leaders. The techniques and criteria have been evolving over centuries, and it has become as described below in the modern days.

Effectiveness of planning

A good teacher should follow the prescribed curriculum and lesson plans precisely. They should be using appropriate teaching aids, materials, and resources successfully. They should be able to plan assignments and activities according to the needs and different abilities of the students. They should also be able to group students based on their instructional needs.

Effectiveness of teaching

The teacher should be able to clarify the lesson objective wholly to the students. They should be presenting the concepts clearly and logically and reinforcing them with real-life examples. The teacher should be able to connect each lesson to past and previous lessons, thereby retaining contiguity. While doing all of this, the teacher should command the students’ attention and contain their discipline. They are to gauge students’ performance regularly without bias and provide feedback.

Interaction and Motivation

A teacher should be able to create a learning environment supportive to students that enables them to display initiative and be participative. The teacher should know and understand every student’s background, and handle each one accordingly with concern and empathy. Their tone should be encouraging and supportive in all one-to-one interactions. They need to establish a difficulty level that promotes success.

Subject Matter Expertise

The teacher must be up-to-date with their respective subject and curriculum knowledge, and be abreast of all the recent trends and news of the relevant education world. They should be able to connect current and past affairs and incidents with the subject matter easily, and present the content logically. 

Communication Expertise

The teacher should have clear pronunciation and a commanding voice that easily captures the students’ attention and maintains it. They should have great presentation skills and intone their lessons in an encouraging way. They must also be great listeners and interact fluidly with students. 

Student Assessment Capabilities

The teacher should be able to evaluate the performance of the students regularly and provide feedback accordingly. They should clearly communicate what’s expected of the students, and employ effective assessment techniques. They should provide proper feedback in a timely manner too. 

Class Management Skills

The teacher should be able to maintain discipline in a class effortlessly and promote self-practiced discipline. They must know how to manage disruptive behavior and set clear parameters for good behavior.

Parent and Community Interaction

The teacher should often take part in open communications with the parents about the best interests of their children, and invite them to collaborative activities. The teacher should actively find opportunities for community involvement for their class.

Management and Peer Interaction

As an employee of the school, the teacher should follow all the employment policies of the school and submit all deliverables on time. They should display great team spirit and cooperate well with other teachers. They should be the first to report any incident or anomaly in their line of duty to the management.

Personal & Professional Growth

The teacher should always find ways to continually improve and develop himself or herself through professional workshops, meetings, training programs, peer reviews, and self-appraisal processes. They should associate with professional committees, clubs, or other associations; and continually keep abreast of recent developments in their own field of study.

Teacher Evaluation Techniques

There may be various ways to measure teacher performance, and you can employ any combination of the following. Just remember, your strategy should be reliable, practical, and efficient.

• Classroom observation: Superiors of the teachers or a school management member can sit in a class and directly observe the teacher and his/her way of having a class. There should be some specific questionnaire drawn up as a teacher evaluation form.
• Instructional Artifacts: Management staff can implement structured protocols using classroom artifacts like lesson plans, teacher assignments, assessments, etc. These classroom artifacts can be analyzed to determine teacher effectiveness.
• Peer-based Evaluation: You can assign other teachers to evaluate a teacher’s performance. Specific peer evaluation forms need to be developed for this.
• Self-assessment: This is a great method of letting teachers understand their strengths and weaknesses. They can describe their goals and accomplishments and room for further development.
• Student feedback: Face it, students are the consumers of your product (education), and therefore their feedback is the most important. Conducting regular surveys with students using specialized teacher feedback forms. This process should be conducted away from the teacher and anonymously so that students do not fear victimization.

A Final Note

It goes almost without saying that running a successful school and being famous at it cannot be done without proper teacher evaluation methods. To do this, first the school heads must decide what kind of evaluation would take place, and who would conduct them. Then you should define the parameters for the evaluation and the data collection methods and reliability process. The whole process needs to be kept transparent from the various levels of stakeholders as well. Besides, letting the parents know of the process would be beneficial for the school’s reputation.

Image courtesy: pixabay

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Building or thinking about a new laboratory for your school, institute, or personal use? Since labs don’t fall under any regular or standardized category, figuring one out is rather difficult. But don’t worry! Here we are with a minty-fresh lab equipment buying guide from Labkafe. This article will help you ascertain what lab equipment you need, how much of them do you need, and where to buy lab equipment.

There are always two parts of any laboratory ‒ lab furniture and lab equipment. We have covered  how to buy lab furniture for school labs previously, and even published guides on  laboratory wall decor and  lab flooring . Now this guide to buy equipment for laboratories will help you with lab apparatus, lab glassware, lab instruments, and lab machines.

To be sure, deciding on, procuring, and managing laboratory equipment is difficult work. To make it easier, let’s take baby steps ‒ by beginning at the beginning.

To Start A Laboratory

To begin with, what is the type of laboratory that you need? In India, laboratories vary by their levels. At school levels, you have laboratories of the most common kind ‒ composite labs for class IX-X, and physics, chemistry, and biology labs for class XI-XII. There is also a  mathematics lab for schools that need it. Recently we are seeing developments in labs of other subjects like sociology and geography as well. For even younger students, there is the  STEM lab facility.

When you get to the university level, the picture changes dramatically. There are simply too many different kinds of college labs to mention here, and all of them have different lab equipment and lab instrument needs. We can talk about those separately, another day.

Therefore, let’s assume you’re building a lab for your school. But what exactly is your goal? There are two reasons to buy lab equipment for schools ‒  either to make a new lab for affiliation purposes, or to upgrade an existing laboratory. Either way, you have some hardcore spreadsheet work before you.

Count Your Chickens

This is the part where we deal with the “what I need” matter. Each laboratory has two dimensions ‒ the first is the count of different lab equipment, and the second is their quantity, a derivative of the count of users. You have to chalk up both dimensions.

Let us explain with an example. The CBSE composite lab, for affiliation purposes, has to follow the  NCERT science lab syllabus directly. That some schools choose to make slight adjustments to it is another matter, and you shouldn’t practice this anyway. Be that as it may, the syllabus has 36 different experiments (and variations or sub-work). That requires a whopping 272 different kinds of equipment! Further, as per affiliation rules, a CBSE composite lab has to cater to at least 30 students at once. That takes the count of lab equipment that you will need near half a thousand.

To be sure, ledgering out five hundred lab equipment is no small task and at first you may feel like drowning. Sure, you can try talking to other schools or beg your contacts to get a full list of lab equipment, but they are 1) very hard to come by, 2) people who have them guard them jealously, and 3) there is definitely a trust factor involved here. 

We at Labkafe understand this perfectly, and have a particularly useful solution for this:  lab equipment packages . Labkafe has preconfigured affiliation packages for different labs for all boards (CBSE, ICSE, ISC,  IGCSE, State Boards, etc.) which are handmade to fulfill the respective curriculums precisely and perfectly. If you are interested in building a CBSE composite lab, as per the ongoing example, you can just order a  CBSE composite lab package from us and be worry-free.

But that’s not all. We would not want you to blindly order something just because you read it here. Instead, how about doing some homework about the quality? You should always check the markets to see which brands provide the best quality lab equipment, apparatus, lab aprons, and glassware. Then crosscheck with your chosen vendor to see if they can give you those brands as well. For example, Borosil, Tarsons, and Polylab are the most well-known names in the lab ware industry for quality, and therefore  Labkafe has joined up with them as well.

Laboratory Items come with different quality levels. The regular quality items are cheaper but not much dependable. The superior quality items are the very best, but will cost you a pretty penny. Lab instrument accuracy will depend upon their quality and manufacturer, and the effectiveness of chemicals and other consumables will depend greatly on their brand. 

Choose Your Champion

Once you have your list of lab equipment ready for physics lab, biology lab, chemistry lab, or composite lab (or any other labs for that matter), your next job is to find a proper lab equipment supplier. This is the part with the most amount of original research, since it is a very bad idea to depend upon the first vendor you come across with a simple “lab equipment near me” search. Sure, private references are great too ‒ but it still is just word of mouth, so best do your homework first.

A proper, reliable laboratory equipment supplier will not only be reputed on paper, but they will be able to  prove their references . The salespersons of a genuinely good company will always be ready with connections. The more references you can get, the better. Also check if they have worked with government agencies or institutes ‒ this will prove invaluable.

For a better experience, we recommend that you prefer OEMs over resellers. Original Equipment Manufacturers will provide you better quality at more affordable prices, will give you flexible choices, and what’s most important ‒ will provide you with good aftersales service.

Which brings us to our next point. In the laboratory industry, good aftersales service is as crucial as it is rare. Most vendors work in a fire-and-forget manner and don’t look back to a customer. Which puts the customer at a disadvantage. There are only a very few companies that give true unlimited support and an ironclad warranty. With such a vendor, you can rest assured that your interests are taken care of properly. This, then, should form one of the pillars of your procurement management.

Money Matters

Ah, the budget! It is a painful subject in any society and schools are no exception. One always wants the best for one’s students. Certainly you want your kids to get the most out of their practical education, in compliance with the  National Education Policy 2020 and global trends. 

That being said, one always finds oneself short of budget, right? Your lab equipment list and labware vendor both must conform with the budget; else all is lost. Few opportunities are given to us to extend our budgets, and saying “it’s for the good of the students” doesn’t seem to be a viable option these days. (Or ever.) 

So, here we are chiseling off portions from our procurement list to make it slimmer. With lab equipment, you can do it two ways:

1. Trim out the experiments. Most cheap schools go this way, not choosing to complete the practical syllabus. Only backbenchers will applaud this.
2. Manage the consumables. More often than not, the consumables get a bigger chunk out of the budget than the equipment themselves. For example, test tubes are cheap and you can buy tons of them, but the reagents that go inside them are so prohibitively expensive that many local vendors don’t even stock some of the most important ones. You can work with your vendor to carefully trim out these lab supplies and work out alternatives.

While the need to conform to your budget is necessary, a word to the wise. The really good stuff in this world never comes cheap ‒ and we should never compromise on education. Reaching a good platform between quality and price is key to your lab’s success ‒ and the future of anyone who uses it.

Another way to save is to buy things in packs. Instead of buying items separately, you would find it much more profitable to buy lab packages and lab aprons packs. Of course, everyone has local choices and needs, and that may force your hand. It would be best if your lab equipment supplier provides customizable lab packages, offering you room to maneuver as well as cost savings. 

In A Nutshell

Making a new laboratory for a school is never easy, and it is even harder for new schools. Today we tried to make the process easier by offering you this lab equipment buying guide. Long story short: list out exactly what you need, find a reputed seller, and hash out a good price eyeing your budget. 

Checking out the equipment (especially the glassware) when they get delivered is a great idea too. A good lab equipment seller will do this onsite inspection automatically and should provide free replacements if anything came out wrong while unpacking. Additionally, Labkafe also gives free installation services, in tune with our vision to spread accessible lab education to every corner of the country.

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Humans have five senses, and hearing is probably the second most important sense. Hearing forms a big part of how we perceive the world, how we learn about events, and above all, how we communicate. In a classroom, good auditory conditions lead to a better understanding of the teacher’s words, faster recognition, and wiser students. A noisy classroom is just the opposite.

What is Classroom Acoustics?

The term “acoustics” means how sound travels through a given space, though it is too much of a simplification. Better acoustics, in general, makes sounds clearer and easier to understand and differentiate from each other. Bad acoustics will make sounds feel jumbled, hard to separate, and in general more confusing than pleasant. It also means how ‘nice’ a sound may feel in your ear, and how much noise is present there.

But what is noise in a classroom? At first thought, a teacher may think that noise in the classroom just means students talking. While that’s not wrong per se, it is so smaller than the real picture. For example, the teacher’s own words bouncing off the walls and ceiling can also create noise. 

Generally speaking, there are two kinds of noises in a classroom ‒ background noise and reverberation.

Background noise

This is a term that means any sound that causes distraction and confusion with the sound you intend to hear clearly. There can be many sources of background noise in a classroom, such as:

1. Other students talking in the room
2. People talking in the hall outside the room
3. Voices from other classrooms adjoining yours
4. Vehicle sounds coming from the street or road outside the building
5. Machine sounds like AC or fans

Reverberation

This term describes how a sound wave behaves when it is generated. Sound has a very reflective nature like light. It bounces off walls and ceilings and floors. That isn’t a problem with light since light is very fast ‒ but sound is quite slow and a reflected sound comes to your ears AFTER the original sound. This causes confusion in our brain’s auditory processing center. If there are many different sounds reverberating at once, then these sound waves will compliment each other and add up to large magnitudes. Meaning, this will get very loud and almost drown out the original.

The two kinds of noises as stated above are not mutually exclusive ‒ they can team up and make a classroom very disturbing indeed. Large schools beside busy roads with lots of students often face this problem, and sooner or later they have to take some action. Why?

Importance of Good Acoustics in Classrooms

A classroom with poor acoustics causes a lot of problems, not limited to just understanding the teacher’s communication. In fact, that alone causes quite a few issues by itself, but there are others as well. 

Poor acoustics causes issues

A student’s learning and behavior depend heavily on how well the teacher’s words go into his or her brain. If that pathway is disturbed, the student will definitely have issues, such as:

• Understanding ‒ if the student has difficulty understanding the teacher’s words, the whole purpose of the class is in danger of failing.
• Linguistics ‒ with difficulty in hearing, the students will find it hard to read text and spell words as well. It stunts their cognitive development.
• Behavior ‒ with their attention not focused on the teacher’s thread of control, the students will get restless and may show disrespectful behavior.
• Attention span ‒ the young age already has a short attention span, and the acoustic distraction only makes it worse.
• Concentration ‒ with lots of background noise it is hard to concentrate on one thing, as we know well.

Keeping the classroom quiet and echo-free solves good portions of these problems and you get a more focused, more attentive, and better-performing audience in your class.

The issue gets worse when a student has problems of his or her own that affect the understanding and perception of the student. For example, a quiet and calm classroom is mandatory is for students who have any of the following problems:

• Hearing issues ‒ if a student already has full or partial hearing loss in an ear, a confusing classroom environment is way more tiring for them.
• Ear issues ‒ having infections or fluid in the ear causes problems with hearing and compounds the discomfort in a room with bad acoustics.
• Learning disability ‒ going undiagnosed by the thousands, many children already have problems with learning. Let’s not add to it by jumbled teacher speech.
• APD ‒ the Auditory Processing Disorder is fairly common these days (about 3%), where people have difficulty processing the words they hear. This increases exponentially with garbled speech or the presence of background noise.
• Speech or language delay ‒ some children take more time developing their speech and understanding language. They suffer a lot if they can’t hear the teacher properly.
• Attention deficit ‒ as we said above, it is hard to concentrate in an environment with lots of noise and reverb.

Advantages of good classroom acoustics

A classroom environment with a good acoustic arrangement where the teacher’s words get conveyed to each student clearly and softly is the best learning environment, audibly speaking. This offers the following benefits:

1. Clear speech commands attention. In a quiet classroom, your words carry weight to every student and demand that they listen. 
2. Faster teaching. A word well heard is a word sooner learned.
3. Less burden on students. If they can hear you well, they will have less trouble processing your subject.
4. Easy on troubled students. If your class has one or more students who have physical issues as mentioned above, then a calm, quiet classroom will be a blessing for them.
5. Saves the teacher. In a quiet and acoustically well-designed classroom, the teacher does not have to shout to get himself or herself heard, thereby saving her vocal cords.
6. Saves time. If the students can hear you fine the first time, you will obviously have a very low need of repeating yourself.
7. Better class performance. When your students can learn more easily, they learn better and consequently perform better at exams, and later in life.

All that above, and we can’t discount the fact that a quiet and soft-sounding workplace is good for the mental health of the teachers as well.

How to Improve Classroom Acoustics

It should come as a no-brainer that when you start building a school classroom you should already be thinking about the acoustics. How a room is built and furnished goes right into its acoustics. But if you are trying to improve the acoustics of an existing classroom, here are some stuff you can try out.

• The floor reflects a lot of the sound since it is closer to the student’s ears. If furnishing permits, try covering the exposed floor with rugs or mats or other kinds of semi-soft floor coverings as much as possible. They will absorb the noise nicely.
• The windows are a good source of background noise. Hang heavy curtains and utilize electricity for illumination instead.
• Try not to use noisy equipment and machines as much as possible, and do get the damn fan oiled!
• Sound waves find easy pathways in a neatly ordered room. So, place the benches in angled order so that the sound can’t find enough straight surfaces.
• If possible, cover the walls in foam as well, to make them very sound-resistant. If done cleverly, it can actually be a nice decoration as well.
• The furniture also makes noise ‒ get them repaired and place them on soft pods so that there aren’t any scraping noises.
• Even after all that, the classroom can still be quite noisy simply due to students talking and being generally children. Resolve this by taking special classes on classroom etiquette and discipline. 

A Parting Word

Poor listening conditions create a negative learning environment for students, that’s beyond doubt. Simple tasks like understanding instructions, reading unfamiliar material or trying to understand basic concepts can become unnecessarily hard just due to incessant background noise and speech reverberation. All of that can be mostly negated with some simple measures as stated above. A quiet classroom with clear speech carrying through is a blessing that will cure many problems at once, and increase students’ performance to boot. 

Need a Free Lab Consultation? Get in touch with our experts now!

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A school lab consumes various kinds of materials, like lab glassware, equipment, chemicals, support items, and so on. All of these have certain quality standards ‒ you can’t just buy something off the street and expect good results. For example, the reagents you use in your chemistry and biology labs come in various qualities, and almost certainly the cheaper one from the street is little more than colored water. This is why you need a trustworthy laboratory item vendor like Labkafe.

1. Nationally and Internationally Certified

Labkafe, the company and its products and services are recognized by many top-tier national and international quality control organizations like the ISO, BIS, SEFA, NABL, GreenGuard, and lots more. These certificates enable you to recognize our brand and products as the very best quality available in the Indian market. When you buy from Labkafe, you can rest assured that your goods are durable, will give good results and you have gotten your money’s worth.

2. Over 1500 Satisfied Customers

Ever since its inception in 2015, Labkafe has been steadily supplying  lab furniture ,  lab equipment , and  lab consumables . We have come far wading through a mass of customers, over fifteen hundred in number in these short seven years. We have left footprints all over India in every state, even overseas, and we connect to resellers to supply even foreign schools and colleges. And you know what? None of these customers have ever turned their backs on us!

3. Prestigious Customers Everywhere

We do not discriminate among customers ‒ everyone is the same with us. Yet, we are proud to have served a large number of high-profile clientele. We have belted in government schools like APSs, JNVs, KVs, and Sainik Schools. We have worked with prestigious colleges and universities like IITs and NITs. We have supplied scientific celebrity organizations like DRDO and ONGC. And we enjoy the patronage of a lot of well-known private institutes like Techno India and Don Bosco. With a portfolio full of such prestigious accounts, we have little if any competition.

4. Strong Presence on GeM

As you may know, government organizations are compelled to procure lab supplies only from the  Government e-Marketplace . And Labkafe is like a beacon there, a  registered OEM on GeM . Present as Orientallabs Retail Services Pvt Ltd in the GeM portal, we provide the best prices and pass every specification check, winning bid after bid. And you know, you can trust who GeM trusts.

5. Fully Customized Lab Design ‒ For Free

Labkafe is famous for our custom lab solutions! Unlike other suppliers, we do not force you to match with our products ‒ instead, we adapt to your requirements. Our engineers will visit your facility and take note of your existing infrastructure. Then we will bring up a plan in 2D and 3D as fits, to show you how your lab could be. You can then customize it at your heart’s content. And guess what? All of this is free of cost!

6. Free Installation and Demonstration

Don’t you just hate it when they deliver the packages and it just sits there waiting for you to dirty your hands? Unlike other vendors or manufacturers, we do not forget the client after the sale is done. Our engineers and technicians will visit your site, open the packs, reconcile the delivered items to the order copy, and then install the equipment and consumables where needed. You won’t have to lift a single finger!

7. Great Warranty Values

We make it, we sell it, we fix it. Our all-encompassing warranty gives you full protection from any accidental damages and other unforeseen quality issues that may arise. We will respect your every concern and we will try to fix any problems with our products. All our products come with ironclad warranty clauses in agreement with all business laws.

8. Awesome Aftersales Support

We pride ourselves on serving our customers faithfully! Our aftersales support team will listen to your every concern patiently and offer solutions that are dependable and minimum hassle. We remember and serve our customers even years after the warranty period, since we know the value of goodwill. 

9. Full Technical Assistance

Procuring school lab supplies can be a complicated thing, especially if you have to do it through GeM. Don’t worry! Our experts will be with you from start to finish, hand-holding you through every step of the procurement procedure. We will prepare all documentation for you, provide remote assistance through Anydesk, and make the whole process smooth and silky for you ‒ on or off GeM.

10. Doorstep Delivery at Any Pincode

That’s right, we deliver anywhere! No longer will you have to suffer handling half of the logistics yourself ‒ we will do it no matter wherever you are in India. We have served schools and institutes in the remotest locations, working through the worst kind of situations. We have delivered perfectly intact lab solutions to customers through landslides, political turmoil, storms, and droughts, day or night, at borders and on icy roads. You cannot depend upon the weather forecast ‒ but you can depend on our delivery truck.

To Pack It Up

All those proud services and excellence, and yet we managed to keep our prices down. This is possible because our vision, which is to see every child have access to affordable laboratory education, is priceless! Our NIT-alumni-founded company is doing more than just business ‒ it is changing the very backbone of educational infrastructure in India. 

We wish to become the face of practical education in the country, to become a story, a name to swear by. Come, join the movement! Add your school or institution to the list of future-proof labs. Be a part of tomorrow!

The post 10 Reasons to choose Labkafe for School Lab Supply appeared first on Labkafe Blog.

The success of any school depends heavily on attracting more and more students ‒ especially early on near the foundation of the institution. At the core of that there should be a great marketing strategy that understands the target market and acts accordingly. Today, we will talk about how to bring more students to school. Read on to know more about how to increase enrollment and how to increase admission in school.

To be frank, marketing for schools is not that much different from marketing for other services. At the beginner level, all you have to do is to stick to the basics of marketing. Which are:

• Clearly define the value of your product or service.
• Research who your target audience is and how best to reach them.
• Throw your value proposition at this target market using your marketing campaigns.

Now, what does that mean for a school? Let’s explore.

Defining your product value

The best way to begin your strategy to bring more students to your school is to start by defining the advantages of joining your school. Identify what makes you unique, and what should attract students (and parents). Every school is different with different history and culture ‒ and so define yours. Some unique factors in your school could be:

1. Your faculty ‒ what about the people who make up the school, who shall be in constant contact with the students all the time?
2. Your students ‒ yes, they are marketing resources too! What makes them special, and what are they doing better than most others?
3. How about having a famous sports team or winning a math marathon?
4. If your school is religious in nature, what values and virtues does it teach?
5. What is the culture of your school? Tie it up with point #4.
6. Learning techniques ‒ does your school use any special approaches that you can boast about? Like a state-of-the-art laboratory or a science park?
7. Technology usage ‒ in the information era, the more modern a school is in terms of technology, the more attractive it will be.
8. Special programs ‒ does your school offer the advantages of a special learning opportunity? It may be within or after the course.
9. Placement assist ‒ if applicable, how much guarantee will you give to place your students in the job market?
10. Finance ‒ in the end, money is the biggest deciding factor. What financial assistance are you giving? What are you giving for FREE?

Find your target market

You are offering a precise service useful only to a certain section of the population. Therefore, figuring out the perfect demographic for your marketing strategy is paramount, or else you’ll be preaching to the wrong crowd. Start with the basics of demography, like,

• Age group ‒ which age people should you target.
• Physical location ‒ shouldn’t they be located locally? 
• Gender ‒ applicable if your school is hosting only one gender.

Add to this some advanced concerns of your customers:

• What are their life goals, and what are they looking for as the outcome of this education?
• Do they have a dominant reason to choose your school over another (like locality)?
• Do they fulfill the prerequisites for admission to your school?
• What income group are their families and how can they pay for their education?

Buyer Personas

A very important factor comes here in the form of buyer personas. Buyer personas are detailed imaginary personal profiles you create for your standard customer. It will include as much pertinent information about the imaginary person as possible, like past education and family culture and political leaning and food habits, and even when do they go to sleep and how much time they spend on Facebook.

This detailed profile will help you and all other stakeholders to understand your customers quickly and help enormously in decision-making. Obviously, there are many kinds of people with many backgrounds, and so you may have to build two-three personas ‒ for example, one for each stakeholder member of the family. Like, one persona of the prospective student, one persona for his/her father, and one for the mother. Then you will know the life and habits of each of them and you can target them individually, taking a holistic approach to generating a lead.

To do this efficiently, proper market research is necessary. If you have the budget for it, your best bet is to get an agency to do the market survey for you. Otherwise, you can do it by brainstorming with your staff and do it by trial-and-error, but that doesn’t guarantee much good in the result.

Build school marketing campaigns

Depending upon your school’s scope and your target market, your market strategy may differ a lot. But for a standard case, the following marketing strategies give good ROI (Return On Investment).

Word-of-mouth marketing

It may sound dusty and rusty for the new-age school principal, but don’t ignore the power of word of mouth. Ask for referrals. Utilize those elements of your school that are directly connected to the community, like existing students, teachers, non-teaching staff, parents even. Let them tell the story about your school and inform the community about your culture, your courses, your certifications, and programs. This self-run method of marketing is awesomely targeted and gets great results if you can do it enough.

Digital marketing

This is the digital era and most of your target audience will be online. Therefore, your website is one of the best channels of generating more enrollment. Do make sure your school website is not just an information page, but is actually designed to generate interest in your school. Also ensure your website is created with mobile users in mind, for obvious reasons.

Once you get a proper website up, it is time to promote that website in the proper circles. Make sure your site offers interesting information regularly via a blog or social media (or both, preferably). Get an agency to do SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to stay on top of the search page. You may be sure that your competitor already sitting on top of the search result page is indubitably doing it. 

One of the easiest ways to get to the top of the google search results page is to use PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising. It does cost you a pretty penny, but it will give you great results if done expertly.

Social Media Marketing

Everybody is on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. these days. Your target audience ‒ especially the younger generation ‒ spends a big chunk of their day on social media. And that’s why you should target that time as much as possible. Figure out what they do all that time on each platform, and post interesting stuff with your school name in those areas. Much like erecting a banner on the road, your social posts should be right where eyeballs go most. 

One of the best ways to do effective social media marketing is to spread user-generated content out there. Do encourage your staff and students and parents to write about or take pictures inside the school and facilities, and share them on their own profiles and in various pertinent groups they have. 

Don’t forget to show off your school on social media. Make sure your social media profiles ‒ especially on LinkedIn ‒ are well optimized and full of bright and interesting posts about your school, culture, events, facilities, etc. Just get the message out that what a heaven this place is for the students and that will be a great hook. 

Offline Marketing

Don’t ignore the power of traditional marketing methods now that we’re in the digital era. Roadside advertisements, commercial media ads, and even leaflets and handbills work well in increasing brand awareness and generating leads. Just make sure your content for all this is powerful and engaging, and pushes your selling points powerfully across verticals. 

Email & Post Marketing

Few marketing strategies work better than the direct approach BTL (Below-the-Line) marketing. If you have a good list of potential customers, then why not reach out and make a personal touch? Use email marketing and send old-fashioned posts with brochures attached. This will require some expense but gives good, personal-level connects which are very valuable. And you know what, some people in fact prefer it this way ‒ they don’t like the impersonal nature of advertisements.

Public Events

Participating in or organizing public events is a great way to increase the reputation and generate more leads. You can join existing prestigious and popular competitions, seminars, online events, etc., or if budget permits, create your own. Do remember to offer some incentives to the attendees, and do make sure your event offers something worth their time. If you are able to feature something or someone particularly notorious in these events, then your school’s reputation and popularity will skyrocket in a night.

Tips to get more students for your school

Make sure your facilities are top-notch

It is a no-brainer that to sell a product successfully, the product itself has to be really good. The same goes for school education as well. Your teaching will depend upon the faculties, of course, but other than that, make sure you can dazzle parents with your school facilities. Your library should be comfy and well-stocked, your laboratories should be futuristic and perfectly equipped, your sports facilities should be spacious and healthy, and so on and so forth.

• Learn how to build a proper CBSE/ICSE lab .

Don’t forget your existing students

Just because they have already bought your pitch doesn’t mean your work with your present students and their parents have finished! Make sure your present clientele hears from you regularly. Make sure that these communications are valuable. And for the love of god, don’t communicate once a year just to ask for more money!

Instead, find out what is valuable to them and find ways to offer them that. It can be something directly or indirectly related to school, no matter, as long as they see that you do care for their needs they will remain impressed with you. An impressed customer is a loyal customer and will work for free to get more customers for you voluntarily.

Make the best offer in the market

Yes yes, you are enlightening the community, building the educational backbone of the nation, and all that ‒ but at the end of the day, by sober reckoning, you are still only doing business. And only that business grows which makes the best offer in the market. To that end, make sure your offer is SUBSTANTIAL as compared to your nearest competitors. 

Your pricing strategy and your products are what are going to give you that competitive edge, when expertly managed. You can become a haven for the LIG (Lower Income Group) with your radically low fee structure, or you can offer awesome scholarships and placement opportunities. There are plenty more to explore here, and your limit is your imagination.

Get some testimonials

People love references from other people. They have a strong urge to believe reviews they read online. And they do not trust things with no reviews and testimonials. Why not take advantage of this fact and build on people’s trusting nature? Get some good testimonials up and running on your website, emails, social media posts, brochures, etc. 

Numbers work magic

If you are dealing with MIG and HIG parents most, you are encountering parents who are very analytical customers and just love data. So make sure all your customer-facing media has lots of nice-looking statistics on them. Throwing juicy fat numbers at customers is a good way to hook them. 

For example, think about speakers. When you want one, don’t you first look for its wattage? And this number is what makes and breaks most speaker sales. The same principle works for schools as well. Let prospective students and their parents know about your school capacity, existing student number, graduation rates, and other KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and you will be sure to impress a lot of good minds out there.

In a nutshell

Getting a good school filled is a big task that has to be approached thoughtfully and through multiple avenues of marketing and internal work. The key to success here is to punch a really good infrastructure and service with good old offline marketing and the new-era online marketing strategies. 

Figure out who should hear you and make them offers they cannot resist, in the most enticing manner you can think of. Repeat your USPs (Unique Selling Points) in front of multiple audiences, through multiple channels. Pay attention and further offer opportunities to your existing students. Combining all, your school will bring in new enrollments so much that soon you will eventually get to pick and choose your students.

Image courtesy: pixabay

The post How do you bring more students to school | Labkafe appeared first on Labkafe Blog.

Are you applying for CBSE, ICSE, or IGCSE affiliation? Or perhaps planning to construct an affiliated school? In either case, designing a compliant and functional science lab is essential.

Here, we share five key tips on how to design a science lab for schools that meets all educational board requirements and optimizes student learning.

Indian education boards—including CBSE, ICSE, IGCSE, IB, and various State boards—have specific guidelines for setting up school labs. This guide will help you navigate the rules and create an effective science lab environment.

Tip 1: Begin Science Lab Design with Early Planning

A laboratory is a critical asset in schools, as it provides hands-on learning, a fast-growing educational approach worldwide. To start, consider these foundational aspects:

• Location: Labs on the top floor offer good ventilation but may require extra safety considerations. Ground-floor labs are often preferred for easier access to utility lines and greater safety.
• Room Size: Most board affiliations specify a minimum lab size (often around 600 square feet), which should accommodate lab furniture, storage, and space for around 30 students, along with the teacher and lab assistant’s workspaces.

Before choosing a location or size, decide how many and what types of labs are needed. Labs can vary from composite science labs for secondary students to specialized labs for physics, chemistry, and biology. Schools might also benefit from adding geography, math, or social sciences labs.

There are four kinds of labs in school ‒

1. Composite (science) lab for secondary level
2. Physics labs
3. Chemistry labs
4. Biology labs

There can also be laboratories for geography, math, and social sciences if you choose to add them to your school (they really do matter!).

Tip 2: Hire a Professional Science Lab Designer

It is lucrative to think that one can do all the designs on their own, or maybe the builder or architect of the school has all the answers. Don’t make that mistake ‒ it never pays well. Instead, call up a professional lab design company like Labkafe to help design your lab. 

They will send experts to measure out the space, note down room features like doors and windows, and come up with a floor plan perfectly suitable for your lab room. Once you get these plans, you will far better understand what should go where and complicated matters such as foot traffic control and ventilation and utility linings. Our experts will explain everything.

Tip 3: Don’t put down utility lines yet.

Your first impulse may be to get the utility lines in the room first (like water, electricity, LPG, drainage) and then build the lab accordingly. This makes things unnecessarily complicated and difficult. Instead, a better idea would be to call up the lab design company first, let them design the space, and then lay the pipes as they instruct. Then do the finishing of the room as fits.

For example, your builder or architect will most probably insert the gas line through a corner in the floor, and put only one switch box with internal wiring beside the door. This is horribly wrong and creates a lot of extra work. 

In reality, a wet lab would require gas lines coming down from framework overhead, and internal wiring in the wall right beside each lab workbench unit. If your lab needs island tables isolated in the middle, then wiring and plumbing has to be done through the floor. Obviously, you can’t do these unless you get the design made first.

Tip 4: Make it safe.

We can’t stress this point enough ‒ lab safety takes paramount importance in lab design. By law you are required to provide adequate safety equipment, ventilation, and evacuation route/training in every laboratory you will build. 

To that end, your lab designer must advise you about crucial points such as safety equipment placement and training, foot traffic control, and ventilation. You’ll need fire extinguishers, eye wash, first aid kit, etc.

We can’t put our kids’ lives to chance ‒ we have to make sure the labs are safe even with human error.

Tip 5: Get certified lab equipment.

Perhaps this goes beyond saying, but it is kind of obvious that you won’t get results if you buy lab equipment from the cheap local market. First of all, there are so many of them! Just building the list of lab equipment, apparatus, glassware, support items, and consumables you will need to cover the syllabus for a single lab is a gigantic and thankless task.

But there is an easy yet reliable solution for that. Look for  lab equipment packages on sale. We have preconfigured affiliation packages that conform to each board syllabuses. These packages bundle everything you need for the affiliation together and so this way you can leave off the extra headache. What’s more, you can also customize these packages if you wish to add or remove something.

Even more important, get your equipment only from a certified manufacturer. A manufacturer always provides better service than a third-party supplier, and better warranties and aftersales support as well. Also check for their certification. A proper lab equipment company will be ISO certified at least. Look for other certificates like BIS, SEFA, NABL etc. as well ‒ the more quality certificates a company has, the more trustworthy their products are.

Finishing Touches

Obviously, the above is not all ‒ far from it. There is the whole purchase/procurement procedure, paperwork, receiving the shipment and overseeing the installation, and checking out if everything is okay or not. A good lab infrastructure supplier should help you in each and every step of the whole cycle, making your experience as fluid as possible. 

At the end of the day, our target remains to make affordable quality practical education accessible to all children. Our skilled organization is geared towards this vision, serving one prestigious institute after another, glowing strong while providing a robust backbone to the educational infrastructure of the country.

The post How to Design A Science Lab for Schools? appeared first on Labkafe Blog.

Both CBSE (Central Board of Secondary Education) and ICSE (Indian Certificate of Secondary Education) are both prestigious boards which have been shouldering a lot of the educational sector responsibilities in India.  They both have quite strict regulations on how to build a school lab ‒ and you need to conform to these CBSE ICSE regulations if you want to get affiliation with them.

According to the  new way education is changing in India , all new schools opening in the country should have a robust laboratory infrastructure. The CBSE and ICSE boards are pioneers in this pathway. And they do have some very specific rules that dictate exactly what you need to make a CBSE or ICSE affiliated school lab for the secondary/higher secondary level. So, what are the rules to make a CBSE ICSE affiliated school lab? Let’s discuss.

CBSE & ICSE Bye-laws for Laboratory

According to the bye-laws one can find in the respective websites of CBSE and ICSE boards, the regulations you will need to follow are these:

Suitability of Rooms

• Lab requirement: One composite or science lab for secondary level; three separate laboratories each for physics, chemistry, and biology subjects for senior/higher secondary level.
• Room size: 9 meters by 6 meters (30’ x 20’ approx),
  • Totalling at least 600 square feet or 54 square meters
• Accommodation: at least 30 students (excluding the lab assistant and teacher/instructor)

Do note here that the minimum dimensions given here (600 sq.ft.) is not much big for the minimum crowd (30 students plus teacher). A laboratory is not a place for crowding and congestion; so, it makes sense to build the room rather oversized than tight-spaced.

Also, if your school is quite big and you need to teach a lot of students at once, then you are well advised to split your labs into multiple rooms. For example, handling 60 kids with access to dangerous chemicals at once is not a good idea ‒ better split them up into two labs of 30 each. Generally, Labkafe recommends that you keep your lab accommodation down to no more than 40 per room.

Suitability of Furniture

Any respectable school laboratory should have the following types of furniture installed:

1. Student workbenches
2. Demo workbench or teacher’s workbench
3. Lab assistant’s table
4. Storage cabinets
5. Accessories (chairs or lab stools, peg boards, eye wash etc.)

For each laboratory room you will have to decide what kind of lab workbench should go into that room ‒ wet lab tables or dry lab tables. Physics lab requires dry lab tables while chemistry and biology labs require wet lab tables. Composite or science labs would require both types in equal numbers. And if you are building a math lab or geography lab, then there are special tables for them as well. Our  lab furniture buying guide will tell you more about what kind of furniture you need for CBSE or ICSE labs.

You should note one thing. The regulations clearly state that your lab should have some storage area inaccessible to students, to store dangerous chemicals. Which means, your chemistry and composite labs should have at least one locked storage solution.

Suitability of Safety/Infrastructure

According to the bye-laws, a CBSE or ICSE affiliated laboratory should have the following:

• Safety precautions like fire extinguishers and eye wash stations
• Utility lines like water and gas
• Easy access to running water
• Ventilation capacity like exhaust fans (multiple)
• Proper access to exit 
• Enough space between workbenches to move around easily

Suitability of Lab Equipment

It should go without saying that without proper lab equipment and apparatus a laboratory is meaningless. Therefore, each laboratory should be equipped to the hilt with all the lab equipment, apparatus, glassware, machines, support items, and consumables that the students would need to conduct all the necessary practical experiments, demonstrations, and activities in the CBSE or ICSE curriculum. 

You can, of course, manually make a list of all the equipment you need for each lad. But it will be a grueling, time-consuming exercise because there are so many different types of work one needs to do in a CBSE/ICSE affiliated lab! We understand this, and so we provide an easy and quick solution to this problem.

Labkafe offers preconfigured  lab equipment packages for each and every CBSE and ICSE laboratory, which we can install in your lab setup and voila ‒ your laboratory is good to go! You will need the following packages for your school if you are looking to get a CBSE/ICSE affiliation:

Each of these lab packages are built carefully by our lab experts to meet the affiliation criteria of the respective board. By default, the packages are configured for 30 students, but you can change that easily. What’s more, the packages are very much flexible and you can configure the list of composite, physics, chemistry, or biology lab equipment and apparatus in any way you wish.  Contact us today and we will be happy to assist you throughout the procurement process.

Checklist to Build CBSE/ICSE Affiliated Laboratory

1. Is the room of the right size/dimensions? (minimum is 9m by 6m)
2. Does the laboratory room have easy entry/exits?
3. Does the room have the necessary utility lines? (electricity, water, gas)
4. Does the room have an adequate number of lab workbenches, designed in a proper way?
5. Does the lab have workbenches for the lab attendant/assistant and the teacher?
6. Are the workbenches adequate for the requirements of the students?
7. Are the lab furniture fire retardant and spill resistant?
8. Is there enough space for easy foot traffic?
9. Is there good enough ventilation?
10. Is there emergency support available? (Fire extinguisher, eye wash, first aid kit)
11. Is there enough lab safety equipment available? (safety glasses, gloves, mask, lab coat)
12. Are there enough lab storages available to hold all the equipment and apparatus?
13. Does the lab have the proper equipment and apparatus to cover the whole syllabus?
14. Does the lab have enough consumables and supplies to last the whole school year?
15. Are the chemicals within their expiry date?
16. Are dangerous laboratory goods kept out of reach of children?
17. Does the lab have a display area for displaying teaching boards/charts?
18. Does the room have some space for the students to deposit their bags?
19. Is there an emergency plan in place?
20. Is the room aesthetically pleasing? (Decorated with good lab wallpaper, side stickers, charts and pictures, etc.)

.The above checklist can help you build a school lab from scratch, or to renovate your old lab. Our experts can help you get through the list and check off each item. Do make sure that the labs you are building for CBSE/ICSE affiliation have all the necessary lab equipment they need ‒ as stated above, our lab packages can be very helpful to you to fill up your lab with exciting equipment and apparatus quickly!

The post Checklist to build a CBSE ICSE affiliated laboratory | Labkafe appeared first on Labkafe Blog.

Cambridge Primary Level

There are 10 subjects in this level intended for school beginners, kids from 5 to 11 years. Each subject breaks down into 6 stages that you can teach over around a year (or more or less as you determine the pace of your institution). Each subject is again divided into ‘strands’ of key learning objectives (for example, English can be structured by four strands of listening, speaking, reading, and writing).

English (First Language)

Cambridge Primary English (as the first language) is intended for kids who already can speak English to a communicable degree. Therefore, you can expect them to read and write and speak in English, to some degree, from the very first class. You will have to structure this syllabus with such content that will help the students acquire a good foundation level onto which the learning of all other subjects can stand. This takes precedence over most subjects since the Cambridge curriculum heavily relies on the English language being a global learning and communication support platform.

English (Second Language)

When you don’t need to communicate in English all the time, but need it for practical purposes like learning and business, then this would be a more suitable choice for non-English speaking kids. This supports a multilingual learning paradigm and should be configured as to provide the best supportive learning environment that can be utilized to learn other subjects in English.

Mathematics

This is the stage where kids need a basic understanding of how math works and have a holistic understanding of the subject. This subject develops in three strands ‒ numbers, geometry and measurements, and statistics and probability. 

Computing

The computing syllabus develops in five strands ‒ computational thinking, programming, managing data, networks & digital communication, and computer systems. Your syllabus should help students to understand what a computer is and how it works in the basic level; and learn basic block-based programming to know how each piece of computer hardware works together.

Science

Perhaps the most important in this era of advancement and enlightenment, teaching science properly at the grassroots level is extremely important for Cambridge. It should develop in five strands ‒ Biology, chemistry, physics, earth and space, and science in context. The learning experience should depend heavily upon hands-on learning and using basic scientific equipment. Your curriculum must encourage thinking scientifically and logically and working through cause-and-effect scenarios. The science in context strand, meanwhile, should focus on the role of science in our society, culture, and history.

Global Perspectives

Focusing on the skills of research, analysis, evaluation, reflection, collaboration, and communication, the Global Perspectives subject ‒ while not mandatory ‒ should still be a subject highly encouraged to the students. This is the subject that truly teaches the “international” part of an international curriculum and so it has immense value. You should prepare the syllabus of this subject to accommodate different perspectives ‒ local and global. The subject should be highly flexible, be integrated as a part of other subjects, and have at least one dedicated class every week. 

Art, Music, Physical Education, Digital Literacy

These are rather unique subjects in the sense that you never teach them in conventional ways. The Art curriculum needs explanation of concepts and approaches for different types of artistry. Learning music should be a fun experience that encourages the students to spread their performative wings, and also teach them to respond to and recognize masterworks. The Digital Learning syllabus should not only teach how to apply a computer for daily usage, but also prepare the child against online malice. And last but not least, physical education should form a very essential part of the curriculum, since regular exercise and an active lifestyle help students to not only stay healthy but also have a great psychological balance. 

Assessments

You need to implement two kinds of assessments at this level ‒ progression tests and a checkpoint. You can take progression tests as soon as you see your students ready; meaning, you can divide them into a flexible routine and spread the classroom assessments and tests evenly or oddly. You have to interpret the results with tools provided by Cambridge and analyze areas of improvement and readjust your teaching methodology accordingly.

The Cambridge Primary Checkpoint is the main course-end key your students have to turn. It will tell you if a student is ready to move on to the next level and their depth of understanding of the subjects. Cambridge provides these tests themselves and marks them (for English, Math,s and Science). You will have to test the Global Perspectives program through a team project, overviewed by Cambridge.  This page will give you more information about the Cambridge Primary Level assessments.

Cambridge Lower Secondary

Best for kids of 11 to 14 years old, this level is somewhat comparable to the previous level, only with more content to learn. Like the previous level, no single subject is compulsory and you can flexibly create your own curriculum. The subjects should have three stages of learning spread over three to four years, each stage taking as much time as necessary for proper understanding and skill development. Cambridge will review the framework to make sure it fits its philosophy and standards.

English (As the first language)

Best suited for Cambridge learners who wish to go truly international and who already have good proficiency in written and spoken English, this subject sits between the basic level of the previous years and the advanced literature levels available later. You should enable it to provide the students with excellent understanding and creative skills useful to study other subjects. Students of this subject should learn about using various language features in professional life, as well as develop a keen, critical reading skill. 

English (As second language)

Less voluminous than the above, this subject is targeted to give the students all the lingual skill support they need to continue studying other Cambridge subjects in English effortlessly in the coming years. Though not intended to be as strong a First language, students should still be able to develop enough skills to use English professionally with the help of this subject. Note that while this subject is not mandatory per se, you should make it so (for students with other First languages), because otherwise, it doesn’t make sense to study in the Cambridge curriculum.

Mathematics

Continuing to uphold the philosophy of thinking and working mathematically, the Cambridge Lower Secondary Mathematics prepares the students for the next level. At this level, you will introduce algebra, continuing to delve deeper into geometry, numerics, and statistics. Your course should also include chapters to familiarize the students with the application of mathematics in other subjects like science and social science, and enable them to study those subjects with enough numeracy and stats skills.

Sciences

This is perhaps the most important stage in a student’s learning journey where childhood’s broad ideas give way to sharper specializations. Teaching not only the whats but also the whys of how the universe functions, this subject builds further understanding of biology, chemistry, physics, earth, and space sciences. The philosophy here should remain strong on thinking and working scientifically and with logical, critical, and analytical skills taking the front seats. 

Provide scientific equipment to your learners to inspect and use wherever possible, and familiarize them with everyday objects using the scientific theories they have understood so far. Still providing a holistic view of the world of science, this should prepare the students for the imminent forking of ways that is to come and advise them about how to choose properly.

Digital Literacy

Putting more emphasis on staying safe online, this subject should teach the students all they need to know to run and protect their devices securely and efficiently. An equal amount of importance should go into respect and concern for other users.

Computing

Introduce text-based software at this level; explore algorithms and flowcharts; get into spreadsheets and databases. Introduce networking and new-age concepts such as machine learning and AI. 

Art

Continuing the same learning objectives as before, the Art curriculum should try and bring out the hidden artist that lives within all children.

Music

This curriculum should let the students explore as many varieties of musical performance and then help them choose which seems best suitable to their persona and abilities. 

Physical Education

Health is wealth and this should be the message that gets drilled into a student at this stage. Maintaining an active and healthy lifestyle with plenty of exercise and team sports to build spirit should be the target of your curriculum. Try out gymnastics carefully too. 

Global Perspectives

At this stage, learners should get to understand why personal, local, and global perspectives differ about the effects and execution of various subjects on life. Same as the previous level, the method of integrating the classes with other subjects should go on here, as should the philosophy of research, analysis, evaluation, reflection, collaboration, and communication. You should also try to arrange full-day activities in this curriculum that help students familiarize themselves with the real-world applications of everything they are learning.

Assessments

You can schedule classroom assessments as you see fit, but Cambridge will provide the Progression tests and the Checkpoint test. Progressions tests are available online and on paper (auto-marking is available for some online tests), which will have to be analyzed using the tools from Cambridge. Compare the results with those around the world and you will get to know how your school is doing internationally. The Lower secondary checkpoint works the same way as before, with English, Math, and Science taken in written papers and Global Perspectives taken as an individual research report. Go to  this page for more information. 

Cambridge Upper Secondary

This is the prime education level that marks the beginning of a student’s career. To enable that, there are plenty of varied subjects available to study at this level (suitable for 14-16 year olds). Depending upon your educational aim, you can go for designing a broad, balanced curriculum offering lots of different areas of learning; or you can sharpen your curriculum into one or two narrow specialties. Or anything in-between, really, Cambridge is truly flexible. The levels are called IGCSE or O-level; here we shall assume you would want to adopt the more popular IGCSE.

What is Cambridge IGCSE

The International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE) is Cambridge’s crown jewel. There are 70 subjects discretely available and each is separately certified. It is a formal recognition of a student’s learning level (at that age, tentatively) on a particular subject accepted worldwide. 

The content for the IGCSE curriculum should be created in such a way that it avoids all cultural biases, and that suits a wide variety of schools. Learners from all kinds of backgrounds with enough knowledge in the base subjects should feel comfortable with the curriculum. The goal of the curriculum should be to provide a baseline education strong in creative thinking, enquiry, and problem-solving skills. 

All learners have to pass course-end assessments, also called components, which consist of written papers, orals, coursework, and practicals. They award grades from A* to G, from high to low. When a student’s first language is not English, there may be some options available through which students can achieve the qualification. This gives students a broader band of opportunities to demonstrate their learning.

Science Subjects

From this level, students get to shape their scientific education. Depending upon your educational aims, you can keep teaching all sciences together as a single subject ‒ or choose the far more normal way of separating each science subject on its own. Of course, the latter way is the best way to provide the most content to your students. To retain flexibility, you should allow students to take any and all science subjects in combination with other subjects. That is, they can choose to take all the science subjects, or they may choose to major in one subject, or may even take one or two of them as electives. 

To even further flexibility, Cambridge Upper Secondary offers two other types of science subject options, separate from standard discrete subject syllabuses. In the Co-ordinated Science option, each science subject has double the course content than normal, and consequently, a qualification in one of these subjects counts as a double IGCSE for that subject. Naturally, this is most useful for students who plan to aim their career down that particular lane, preparing early. Conversely, students who do not need to study science any further than this level can take Combined Science, having one-third content of each subject. 

Core Subjects and Supplements

All the main IGCSE subjects ‒ that is, English, math, and science subjects come in two flavors ‒ ‘Core’ and ‘supplement’ (or ‘extended’). Anyone taking one of these subjects must complete the core tier to qualify for passing IGCSE. But, their grading will be capped within C to G only (as opposed to A*-G grading for other subjects). On the other hand, those who wish to specialize in a particular direction can take the ‘supplement’ tier add-on have to study a lot more, but now they will be graded on the full A* to G scale as normal. 

You should take care while designing your IGCSE curriculum around this methodology. The core subjects are intended to provide a well-rounded education to go forward in career and life. Whereas, the extended syllabus is much more cognitively demanding and only applicable to future experts ‒ normal students without a special affinity to the subject won’t be able to cope with them. 

Clearly, your choice of streaming your students into either tier will hugely impact the future education and career of your pupils. Schools know their students best, and if you think all your students can handle the extra load then by all means go ahead and choose all science subjects at the supplementary tier. But if your school caters to a rather backward sect of the demographic then we advise you to keep all subjects at the core tier only. Schools serving all kinds of students will, of course, want to keep both options open. 

Remember when we talked about continuity in the  last article ? This is a fine example where that applies strongly. If you or your students want to study a supplement tier subject, they would need a strong, continuous line of progression previously. If your institute is providing multiple certifications with the option to change lines, then you will have to make sure your IGCSE core and supplementary subjects are compatible with the other course you’d teach before this level. If educational gaps are unavoidable ‒ as they sometimes are, when going inter-discipline ‒ you would also have to provide proper support courses for short term.

Flexibility is a good deal more prominent at the IGCSE level. The Cambridge Upper Secondary level is recommended to be studied for two years, but schools may choose to complete it in one or three years as well. Some schools may require students to study 8-9 subjects for a longer period, and some others can utilize a more specialized curriculum with only 5-6 subjects. Please take into account the flexibility of offering combined or coordinated subjects, core or supplementary.

Last but not the least, remember that from this level onwards practical education gets really serious. You should have the proper  laboratory infrastructure for this, and Labkafe can help you set up an IGCSE-level laboratory.

Cambridge Advanced

At 16 to 19 years of age, students are raring to get specialized, to get into careers. Naturally, they would want to study specializations only. However, you can still use this time to teach a broad, balanced syllabus ‒ or you can specialize. This is called the Cambridge AS & A Level.

What are Cambridge AS & A Levels

‘AS’ stands for ‘Advanced Subsidiary’ and ‘A’ stands for ‘Advanced’. The AS level subjects have half the content than A level subjects, and students are generally capable of finishing them in one year only. AS levels need two years. Degrees are offered at the end of both years, and there are options to sit for board exams at the end of either year as the student chooses. Meaning, that an A-level student can go through the tests in two iterations or a single one at the end of the course.

In most parts of the world, a Cambridge AS level degree is sufficient to enter there. Students can carry forward their AS level credit and get a full A-level later. As these are almost all specialty subjects, they demand more classroom and individual study time.

The Cambridge advanced level brings great flexibility to this slab. You can either provide non-staged, solid blocks of A-level or AS-level degrees (after 2 or 1 year of study respectively). Or you can let the student go through a staged approach, where each stage of one year includes some AS and A level subjects. In the first year, all subjects will be AS level; next year, the student may choose to keep some of them to upgrade them to A level and replace the others with other AS level subjects. An example follows:

• Year 1:
  • Mathematics AS level
  • Physics AS level
  • Chemistry AS level
  • Biology AS level
• Year 2:
  • Physics A level
  • Computation AS level
  • Global Perspectives AS level

In this example, the student has chosen to specialize in advanced physics, and so dropped one subject to free up study time for the advanced content. Meanwhile, she is covering a total of 6 subjects, in all of which she will be internationally acceptable if passed.

Cambridge Pre-U Program

The Pre-U program is available as a diploma or separate recognition. If the student chooses to get a Pre-U diploma (recognized throughout the world for university grade qualification), then she has to choose three subjects. Or she can take certifications in each of those subjects discretely. However, to get the diploma the Global Perspectives & Research qualification. All of this can be done in parallel to or in replacement of the A-level program. The qualifications are graded finely into nine levels of recognition (3 each for Distinction, Merit, and Pass). Note that you have to get special approval to get this implemented in your school.

A Last Word for Implementing the Cambridge Curriculum

Flexibility. Integration. Global recognition. Global understanding. All of these are salient points of the Cambridge curriculum and so should they be yours as well when you need to build it into your school. School subjects should target conceptual development, and substantive content should form the widest part of the curriculum. Overlapping of concepts inside the curriculum throughout subjects should be expected and welcome. For example, a student may encounter the concept of renewable energy in physics, geography, economics, and politics. The global perspectives pathway can help them reconcile these overlapping concepts easily and effectively. In the end, a robust yet adaptable framework will be your key to success while implementing the Cambridge curriculum in your school.

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