Location: Chittor, Andhra Pradesh

School: VSR School

Grade/Class: 5th – 9th Grade. 80 students

Sessions Conducted :

1. Intro – This was an interactive session hosted by Himadri at PCL, about the importance of STEM and point of teaching them through this method. The students were firstly asked basic questions like what is STEM?What is the importance of STEM? STEM in daily life? etc. The goal was to get the students to organically figure the point of this whole session on their own.
2. Free Hands On Demo: The students were handed the following PCL finished kits:
   1. Infinity Mirror
   2. Pop-up Room
   3. Light up Badge
   4. Automata
   5. Zoetrope
   6. Flipbook
   7. Gyroscope. These were handed over to the kids without any explanation, to explore and form their own opinions on it. Post that the students were asked the concepts from their classes that is shown in these kits.
3. Hands On Activity: Only the students from 6th and 7th grade were requested to stay back for this session. The students from 6th grade were handed the “Tanjore Bommai Kits” and the 7th graders were given “Doodle Bots”. These were kits based on simple machines and simple electronics (Motors, Battery, etc). They were given one hour to complete, and most of the students expertly finished it in the time frame. The key takeaway here was to question the students on the concepts while they were working on it.
4. Teacher Orientation & Discussion: Post lunch about 18 teachers attended this session. Firstly, we went on the take their feedback on the entire session. This helped us ascertain whether the teachers themselves were convinced with PCL’s activity based learning methodology. All the teachers were on board, and suggested if our future sessions could be clubbed with concepts from their curriculum. As we move forward, we would be training these teachers to hold the PCL science sessions.

Parting Notes and Impact

Overall a very successful introductory session, where the students quickly grasped the activities and concepts. This in turn helped us convince the teachers about the importance of activity based learning. Moving forward, PCL would be hosting a 3 day teacher training session. The teachers who are trained in this will go on to hold weekly sessions corresponding with the concepts taught in their science class.

Our journey with Akanksha Foundation started about 5 months ago. We have been doing Science with Paper Classes online with the students of Matoshri English Medium School in Pune. It started off as an after school hobby class but we soon transitioned to teaching during their science classes in sync with what they were currently studying, to much success. 

After a brief hiatus, we resumed classes this week. We had an interesting mix of classes for the week – Heat for Grade-7 and Simple machines through Rube Goldberg machines for Grade-6. 

Heat – Spinning Snake

We made a Spinning Snake – a spiral loosely held on a pointed stick, that would start spinning gently when you lit a candle underneath. The students were excited to work with candles. This was the first class where I noticed they were not scrambling for materials. So with all that enthusiasm, we began the class. First we discussed basic concepts of heat sources, direct and indirect modes of heat transfer. We talked about Hot Air Balloons and Paper Lanterns (which a lot of them had lit during Diwali), to understand convection better. While they knew the basic concepts of how the candle heats air around it, that hot air is lighter and rises, they couldn’t quite make the connection to the word convection. I believe this is not really a problem because as long as they understand how things work and are able to experiment with the concepts, things are good. What are your thoughts? (I digress, but I’ve long since stopped trying to remember names of inventors and things like that because in this day and age, it makes little sense to remember something that you can google in a second. Although this situation doesn’t quite fall under the same category, it is something to think about.)

My spinning snake got completely mangled because I somehow managed to set it on fire yet again. A moment of learning for me is that no matter how many times you make something and try to perfect it, Murphy’s law will come into play when you need things to work the most. But my moment of happiness struck when one of the students flawlessly demonstrated the Snake spinning before the class had ended, and not to forget, the almost symmetric polka dot snakes that everyone had patiently made for the activity.

Simple Machines – Rube Goldberg

Rube Goldberg machines which we did with Grade-6 was another hit of a class. With this set of classes that we started again, we tried sending instructions to make the project along with the list of materials a day before. This was surprisingly well received and two students had already made some of the components and brought them to class! However there were also one or two students who were skeptical and didn’t think they had enough knowledge to make it. (I like to believe) This changed once we started making it and explained how complicated looking things are usually a combination of simple things – simple machines, in this case.

We started class with a video of a Rube Goldberg machine from Tom and Jerry. Then we looked at how to make simple machines like inclined planes, see-saw, and pulleys using cardboard or paper. The goal was for the students to make a name reveal card for themselves using at least two different simple machines. I always enjoy moments when students come up with fun and different ways to substitute materials they don’t have – in this case one of them didn’t have a pin to join the see-saw mechanism so they used a bit of yarn instead!

Another addition for this set of classes is the quiz that we have planned for every class. Questions related to the activity performed in class packaged in a fun format (videos, and questions that make them tinker with their project to come up with answers) are assigned as homework in order to help us get a feel of where the students stand with respect to understanding and retaining concepts discussed in class.

Looking forward to the adventures the next set of classes will bring. Until then, happy experimenting!