Research Journal of Applied Sciences, Engineering and Technology 11(1): 1926, 2015 DOI: 10.19026/rjaset.11.1671 ISSN: 20407459; eISSN: 20407467 © 2015 Maxwell Scientific Publication Corp. Submitted: December 10, 2014 Accepted: January 27, 2015 Published: September 05, 2015   Zurni Omar, Department of Mathematics, School of Quantitative Sciences, College of Art and Sciences, Universiti Utara Malaysia, Malaysia, Tel.: +60194443993 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (URL: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). 19                 J.O. Kuboye and Zurni Omar Department of Mathematics, School of Quantitative Sciences, College of Art and Sciences, Universiti Utara Malaysia, Malaysia ! In this study, a new block method of order nine is proposed to solve second order initial value problems of ordinary differential equations directly. The method is developed via interpolation and collocation approach where the use of power series approximate solution as a basis function is considered. The properties of the developed block method which includes zerostability, order, consistency and convergence are also established. The numerical results reveal that the new method performs better than the existing method when applied for solving second order ordinary differential equations. "# Block method, collocation, interpolation, initial value problems, ordinary differential equations $%&%$ In this study, numerical method for the direct solution of initial value problems of ordinary differential equations of the form β α = = = ) 0 ( , ) 0 ( ) , , ( y y y y x f y (1) is examined. Efforts in the development of numerical methods for solving higher order initial value problems especially second order ordinary differential equations have been made by eminent scholars such as Awoyemi (2001), Adesanya et al. (2008), Kayode (2008) and Yahaya and Badmus (2009). Recently, much attention had been devoted in developing predictorcorrector methods for solving (1) directly. It is noted that this method is associated with some limitations and these are: computational burden which as a result of many functions to be evaluated, combining of predictors that are of lower order with the correctors. All these highlighted drawbacks affect the accuracy of the method (Kayode, 2008; Adesanya et al., 2008). In order to advance the accuracy of numerical methods, block method was introduced to simultaneously generate numerical results (Adesanya et al., 2013; Omar and Suleiman, 1999, 2003, 2005). This method gives better approximation and found to be cost effective because of the evaluation of few functions involved. The derivation of block methods with lower steplength for solving second order ordinary differential equations have been considered by researchers like Adesanya et al. (2008) and Mohammed et al. (2010) in which the accuracy of the methods are very low. To bring improvement on the accuracy of block method, this study considers higher steplength k = 8 for the development of block method that can solve second order initial value problems of ordinary differential equations directly. %’()* Power series approximate solution of the form ) ( 1 0 + = = s r j j j x a x y (2) is considered as an interpolation polynomial. Where r and s are the number of interpolation and collocation points, respectively. Equation (2) is differentiated twice to give: + = = 1 2 2 ) 1 ( ) ( s r j j j x a j j x y (3) The approximate solution (2) is interpolated at x = x n+i , i = 5(1)6 and we collocate Eq. (3) at x = x n+i , i = 0(1)8. The interpolation and collocation equations give: AX = B (4) where, X = [a 0 , a 1 , a 2 , ..., a 10 ] T , B = [y n+5 , y n+6 , f n , f n+1 , ..., f n+8 ] T the value of A is shown in Appendix A.