Bigshot: Biology field trip

I had presented BigShot cameras at the teachers meeting at Udavi with the hope that someone will want to pursue it with grades other than 6th and 7th that I interact with.

It was interesting that the first opportunity presented itself through Biology. Geetha the teacher had mentioned that she was planning to take the children out on a field trip to the crocodile park and through it would be interesting to take a few cameras along. It didn't take long before she realized the utility of the children putting together the cameras rather than being given the cameras as it would be instructional and increase the ownership of the instrument during the trip.

As I had worked with these children the last year and they were a little older I gave them the option of watching us build it or building it themselves. I was not surprised when they came back with, we can do it ourselves. The children assembled the cameras at different paces. Most groups needed a little support when they came to the finer components of the camera lens.

Most groups went over the instructions and in most places these are supported well with images so the groups having a little difficulty also had support with the images.

The children enjoyed the session and then went out and took some pics of the school.

The next day they went to the crocodile park and took plenty of pics. The children sorted through some 100 odd pics from each camera and put together an album for me. I've put together a few of these pics that were non-overlapping.

The children also wrote about their experiences with the Bigshots camera. The children found the process demystifying. Some children found reading the manual the difficult part. Most found the actual assembly a lot easier than they expected. Almost everyone was thrilled and enjoyed the experience. At the crocodile park some ran out of charge quite fast (possibly because its not obvious how to turn off the display) and the hand crank kept getting stuck for them. Here are some of their experiences. 

Gear Up: Lesson using bigshot camera

The children in Udavi 6th grade had assembled the bigshot camera and taken pictures. They had also taken note of some of the components of the camera. We started with the gear box to learn more about gears, how they work and what kind of math they would need to learn to appreciate and predict what happens.

The obvious gears that the kids knew about was my gear cycle. We flipped the bicycle upside down and the kids counted the gears. The kids tried to find more efficient ways to count and finally concluded with 42 teeth. They then went out to count the number of gears. We had seen a couple of videos on gears including Aravind gupta video on making it from cardboard. We talked about whether the smaller or the larger is a higher gear, what the additional gears that are always engaged (derailleurs) do. 

Thanks to the video most kids were able to conclude that the smaller the diameter in the back wheel the higher the gear. When we got to the ratio of the chain wheel vs the back wheel the kids were ok with the gear with 21 teeth for a ratio of 2:1, but got stuck on 28 teeth. It was a note on what we will be learning this year to be able to talk about it by the end of the year.

I also demonstrated with a few gears how we could make a model with different kinds of gears to rotate small (fast) and large wheels (slower) when they are coupled. We then looked at a gear game Kogworks which seemed appropriate and looked at the patters that can be formed and whether the wheels still spin if the number of gears in a loop are even or odd...

One of the kids the brought his toy car and opened it up to reveal that he noticed gears in it. He showed how pulling the wheels back cocks the large gear and releasing it makes the smaller one that drives the wheels of the car move.

BigShot @ Udavi 6th-7th grade

Udavi has started and I decided to give the bigshot camera a spin in the fist class for the 6th graders. Many children have had difficulty reading the technical instructions by themselves so for the first assembly I made a two groups of children one that would be reading and guiding their class teacher (Sudhir) and the other group who would be reading the instructions and guiding me.
Like always the spoils of finishing the camera first is that you get to photograph the other group still working on it. Fact is I just wanted the process of building the camera to be photographed on one of the cameras.
We took turns to give all children a chance to read, some of the children can read the instructions quite easily, other have a lot of difficulty. Most were able to figure out what needed to be done from the images in the instructions. The only place they had an issue was when fine parts were involved and they could not quite get the handle on the zoom in the images changing.
Here is a link to some (of the better) images taken that day with the two cameras (can you figure out which camera took which?)

The indoor pictures were extremely hard to take as the classrooms are well ventilated from all sides and the photographs come against the light. This makes many of the indoor pics blur. It was interesting that one child quickly noticed that there was no zoom as they would have liked :). Nonetheless, once outdoors the images were great and the children had fun taking them.

I transferred the pictures to a pendrive and charged both the cameras for the next day. The second day the 6th graders watched the photos and looked at the instructions and worked backwards on how to disassemble the camera. As we kept taking turns and going backwards in the book a few had a little difficulty keeping track of what we had removed (as there were sometimes more than one instruction for fixing an object - placing it, screwing it in place) however, as you unscrewed some things they just came apart. Also the idea of going Japanese on a book was a little confusing, but as Manga comics tell you good for your brain to read backwards.

The cameras got disassembled without loosing any components and within a couple of hours reassembled by the 7th graders. We followed a similar process of two groups in the Math class. Though the Math teacher was a little concerned with the new activity initially he went along and really seemed to have enjoyed himself. There is a joy of taking an effort and putting something together and seeing it come to life.

Introductions done, we now get to work on making the camera relevant to learn math and science concepts.

It begins again :)

The 5th - 7th grade I worked with at Isai Ambalam has become the 6th - 8th grade this year. The 8th graders will join another school after the first term and I decided use their presence to to continue the gains of a multi-grade classroom.

We had done a few things the previous week, but the admissions had happened that week and it was only this week that we had the full strength in the class with many new students. My goal was to provide a context to mathematics and get the children to start engaging in class.

We had started an EBD (Education By Design) project the previous week that would demonstrate what the most common mistake in addition of fractions of adding the numerators and the denominators together meant in real life. The 8th graders had an handle on programming through the summer camp and we decided to take up this project in scratch.

As part of EBD we derived the quality criteria and formed groups centered around the 8th graders so the children could quickly learn from each other.

The children found it easy to create 1/2 and 1/4 based fractions, but difficult to do for 1/8, 1/6 etc. One group created one 1/8 unit and rotated it by 45 degree to complete the circle.

I had been hoping to find something they knew that would connect what we were doing now (some 6th graders didn't know fraction addition) and I found this in the circle.

We started talking about what we knew about circles. The children knew that a circle is created by keeping the center at one place taking a certain length (with a thread) and moving it around. I asked what would happen if we were spinning an object in a circle and the thread snapped at the highest point. The children gave interesting answers - still along the circle, going down because of gravity and even one that went up before it went down. I then switched the question to something that was spinning horizontally and this really confused children as they knew that something was happening in two dimensions. It didn't help even when I talked about spinning on a table or on the floor where the vertical dimension is not important.

At this point they really wanted to know what happens and I introduced tangents and how small tangents (90' with the line from center to the point) when rotated by appropriate angles can give rise to regular polygons. We also saw that as the angle of rotation becomes really small the number of sides becomes really large and looks like a circle. This is the easiest way to build a circle that doesn't use trigonometry (it will come later).

A tree that had fallen in a recent storm was pulled out by a tractor and it twisted and broke another tree it had fallen on. We talked about why the second tree had broken and them more interesting how it had broken. After taking out the first guesses, the weight had increased - had it really? One student remembered that the second tree had in fact twisted, not snapped. We put two chalks on top of each other and noticed that as top one is moved away (tangentially) over the lower the lower chalk twists. Now the kids started to recall tangents and one example was that motor cars stuck in the dirt throw back dirt when they rotate.

We spent some time on angles as the younger children didn't seem to quite have a handle of it. What is an angle? The (guess) history of 360 degrees being a full angle and what different angles of objects in class including the door would be. We also looked at the number of angles in a shape and differentiated between internal and external angles.

We wrapped the week with a class where the younger children were learning scratch from the older kids and we talking about why we learn mathematics and how we can see and apply it in real life. This conversation took us to estimations like how much water does the school use and how math can help us find the volume of a cylindrical tank on campus or help us find out how much water overflows from the tank if the motor is switched off 5 minutes after the tank filled up.

We of course continued with putting the bigshot cameras together. This time the students who had participated in building it the first time took lead and others helped them. Us teachers also made a camera and the game was afoot. The first person to finish the camera would take pics of the others who were still working on their cameras. Here are the pics of the other two groups at work (what did you expect :)).

 

Bigshot camera: the DIY digital camera

Bigshot is a neat DIY digital camera that children can put together and brings to life many principles in math and science for children.

I have this blog to thank for getting the work with the children across to Shree Nayar the inventor of the camera who gifted 10 to see what the kids from a rural setting would take to it.

I am hoping that this is an opportunity to engage with teachers I have not had a chance to work with at school and also engage the teachers in the classes that I am involved in.

The first step was to make the cameras myself, fortunately, I have not had the time and while Udavi is still to open a few kids in Isai Ambalam had started coming even though admissions are ongoing. This gave me a chance to build the camera along with kids who would be interested. I took a bunch of games to class and after we played a few rounds suggested that I would build it and anyone interested could sit and watch. As I started to assemble the camera and the kids saw that I was only following instructions they first started to help me with the instructions identifying the 30 odd components. Before I knew it one of them was screwing some of the screws in and then the other. Three kids remained with me through the 20-25 minutes it needed to put the camera together. We had a bit of a bug with the switch initially and then with the LED in the front that would not lock, but otherwise it worked like a charm. 

The kids took over the camera and went in a group around the sparsely populated school (its admission time, but children interested can come in this week) and took some pics (132 of them). They also tried out the different modes including the 3D photographs, they still need to figure out the lighting, etc as only 80 odd pics were usable.

The kids are now keen to put the camera together and I sat in the next class and disassembled the camera to allow for a second round of re-assembly. It took me a little less time to take it apart (why is it that it always takes longer to build something than to take it apart) while the children were busy assessing what they remembered from last year. 

Here is the picassa album with some of the photos. Note a few pics in the end are 3D pictures.