A year of Aura Auro Design

Aura Auro Design is now a year old! We put together a small reflection of the year gone by! Here is the pdf.

Aura Auro Design – First year reflection

learn, grow, work, teach

Sanjeev Ranganathan, Bala Anand, Sundranandhan Kothandaraman, Vaidegi Gunasekar

Jan 2016

About this note

Aura Auro Design, a project of SAIIER, is a team of engineers Sanjeev (AV), Sundar (AV), Bala (AV) and Vaidegi (Bio-region) who teach in the schools (Udavi and Isai Ambalam) 3 hrs a day and learn, grow and work in electronics 5 hrs a day. The project explores innovative ways of STEM education primarily through their STEM Land initiative. The team also finacially supports Udavi and Isai Ambalam schools, Reach for the starts program and AV maintenance.

At the end of the first year of Aura Auro Design we report briefly our activities in the first year, reflect if we are aligned with our original goals and what direction or goals we set going forward.

Brief summary of goals of Aura Auro Design

- Exploring if an alternative business model where the primary goal is personal development and growth of its staff and contribution to community can be effective in the real world.

- To create an enviroment where skilled youth can engage with children in schools to learn beyond simple procedural learning from 5^th to 8^th grades and move into application and problem solving.

- To create an alternative to examinations as a way for children to demonstrate their learning.

Some activities of the first year

- Engagement with Isai Ambalam school and Udavi school 3 hrs a day

- Participation in the Stewardship for New Emergence workshop and working with Dr.Monica Sharma to look at system parameters to include in our work to be effective in the long term

- Learning about learning – reading and presenting chapters of – what did you ask at school today by Kamala Mukunda

- Taking up two courses of Interactive Python through Coursera and make variety of python games

- Conducting an electonics class open to anyone in and around AV that used simulations and building circuits as a way to practical learn electronics

- Noticing breakdown of replicating and propogating the same patterns of education we wanted to address and the breakthrough of creation of STEM Land

- Creating a space for youth to come in and interact (and learn) with children and build things with them

- Slowly seeing engagement from children from various schools of Auroville in STEM Land (Isai Ambalam, TLC, Last School) in the hope of enabling learning engagement between children of various schools, backgrounds and nationalities

- Making progress on 3 software projects (80% completion) and 1 hardware project (90%) that was proposed by Aura Semiconductor Pvt. Ltd.

- Putting aside time (three hrs a week) during work time to read

- Tracking our growth and documenting the work of children through the blog www.auraauro.com

- Presenting a paper at epiSTEM6 at HBCSE (Homi Baba Center of Science Education)

www.auraauro.com/showcase/

- Learning to work together and collaborate, moving towards a Likert-Emberling Stage 4 organization

Papers and Articles in 2015

- Ranganathan, S., Anand, B., Kothandaraman, S. & Gunasekar, V. (Dec 2015) Using programming with rural children for learning to think mathematically, epiSTEM6, HSCSE (Homi Baba Center of Science Education)

- AV Times (Dec 2015), ALICE in STEM Land

- The Hindu (Oct 2015), Making, tinkering and engineering their way to knowledge

Beief conclusions

- We needed to keep the priority of learning and growth over work often in mind to avoid getting carried away with deadlines, products and short term efficiency. Though it requires a partner company that is understanding of our work holistically, it has been possible to make some progress on projects with Aura Semiconductor Pvt. Ltd and they are continuing to support Aura Auro this year.

- It is possible to create a space where children can learn through inspiration rather than through compliance. It is significantly more effort for teachers vs 'efficient' classroom teaching and requires us to be true to AV goals of constant progress and unending education.

We have been inspired with the work done by children to demonstrate what they are capable of when given a chance. http://www.auraauro.com/category/showcase/

Going forward:

- The work at STEM Land is meaningful not only for the children we are working with, but also for children throughout the country. But, we need a lot more rigor and research to make this happen.

- We need to find mechanisms of accelerated growth as electrical engineers and work on time management and presence to be effective at work in the time we have allocated to it.

- We need additional people to support our work at STEM Land and will be supporting another youth Naveen (AV) to help us organize the space and keep it open from 9:00 a.m. - 2:00 p.m. Mon-Sat.

- We hope for a richer interactive experience with Aura Semi this year and also grow the number of youth supported in the project to 5 over the course of six months (June).

Reflections from the team

1) Bala Anand

I started the year as a novice knowing very little about work and life. Aura Auro has brought a big change to me. I have learnt a lot during this one year.

As Aura Auro is an electronics centre, it is essential that I am good at it. I knew very little at the beginning. Aura Aura has given me an oppurtunity to learn and grow as an Engineer. I have learnt to anaylse circuits, run simulations, build PCB boards, windows and linux administration, programming in python, etc... I am learning to design circuits, working efficiently by managing time and being organized and learning to work being part of a team.

Teaching was completely new to me. Over the year I have come to terms in managing a class. It gives me happiness to guide the children and share some of the knowledge I have.

Setting up STEM land in Udavi was a big learning curve. I was put in situations where I felt I was responsible. Though I did fail at times it was a learning experience.

We presented a paper in Mumabi, episteme 6 – international conference on Stem education. It gave us an oppurtunity to talk about the different things we do at school. The paper was accepted well and felt that we are going in the right direction.

Making contributions to schools and to Auroville makes me feel that I am doing something to the society around me.

Attending Steward for New Emergence (by Monica Sharma) workshop early in the year was a big positive for me. I learnt lots of tools and that helped me at work, school and personally.

Overall Aura Auro has been a place where I am growing daily, learning and experimenting new things.

2) Sundranandhan Kothandaraman

Time Lapse

The year 2014-2015 was diverse and had a lot of beautiful experiences to offer me. Being part of Aura Auro Design team the learning as an engineer was extensive. I can tell this journey is offering me a lot not only as an engineer, but also a teacher. The Whole oneness of learn, grow, work, teach has made me realize something special, that I am exploring on how to offer at various instances of being myself...

Working with children is a sense of blossomness, I see myself grow along with the children. Wanting to learn something comes form a inner space of the freedom to learn it, that is the experience I share along with the children towards their growth at STEM Land. The work shop Stewardship for new emergence has given me a whole new perspective approach to accomplishment of specific goals and evaluation measures on them.

3) Vaidegi Gunasekar

My stands are Perseverance and Agency (capacity to act in any given situation). AuraAuro laid a clear path for my career as well as social activities (teaching). In this duration of one year I learnt many things in Electronics (which I never even thought of in my under graduation) and Teaching (how to teach and classroom management). This gives me satisfaction on what I did in the entire course of learning.

As an Engineer

I can see myself that I'm growing as Engineer. I'm not doing the same work repeatedly. Everyday I'm doing something new or in different way. This makes me think, engage and apply thoughts based on my previous mistakes. AuraAuro also created space to collaborate and discuss when I face an issue or when I build something.

As a Teacher

As per my perspective, a teacher was one who give all the instructions (what to do and don't). But Aura Auro broke that idea. It created a environment where I observe and guide the students instead of giving them each and every instruction to do something. In the middle I learnt being 'effective' is more important than being 'nice' to all the children.

I also learnt that “ If you want to understand something, change it. But, if you want to change something, understand it.”

4) Sanjeev Ranganathan

Aura Auro has been an amazing growth experience and helped me undestand the gaps in my engagement with children. I find I am finally beginning to understand Sri Aurobindo's first principle of true teaching that nothing can be taught and starting to take my first steps towards being an integral teacher.

STEM Land offers a possibility of putting free progress in action with children or attempting to teach not by compliance, but by inspiration...but much work is needed, both on us and by us in the future.

References

Mukunda, K.V. (2009) What Did You Ask at School Today, Harper Collins.

A Big Thank you to

- To Saracon and Chandresh for providing us the workspace to initiate this effort.

- To Aura Semiconductor Pvt. Ltd. for supporting this initiative financially and providing challenges for us technically

- To the stewardship for the new emergence program for leadership development and helping us work as a team from possibility rather than fear

- To the many people who helped us set up STEM Land including (but not exclusively) - SAIIER for their support on purchase of materials, equipment, books, etc. For letting us revamp and use two cupboards that were up for disposal, Freecharge.com for second hand laptops, friends for purchasing robots and puzzles. Sree Nair for donating bigshot cameras he designed. Aura Semi for inverters. PCG for the second mindstorm and some new games and puzzles, children for organizing STEM Land themselves.

About our partner Aura Semiconductor Pvt. Ltd.

Aura Semiconductor is a fabless semiconductor company providing high performance RF & analog solutions. Aura Semiconductor was founded in 2010 with focus on developing technology leadership in the areas of RF, clocking, audio and power management.

Experiences at STEM Land...

A few recent experiences at STEM Land that touched me...


- I have been touched how elder and younger children with similar interest are willing to work together as equals. How open elder children are to learn from younger children who have developed an expertise at something.
- We didn't spend a single rupee on labor to set up STEM Land. A big we (Aura Auro, our friends, volunteers and the children) did it ourselves.


- I had decided that I was going to let STEM Land self organize. One day some younger children came to me and told me that a couple of elder children had taken their laptops. I told them to work it out among themselves. About 10 mins later I had opportunity to work with the elder children and I enquired what happened. The elder children without batting an eyelid said that STEM Land is a place of work and they only took the laptops from two children who were playing computer games and not working seriously.


- We started working with the 9th grade girls only this term and in the beginning they would only stay in the games, materials room and not explore the technology room. This week I had a couple of girls working hard to create a story using programming in a 3-D environment and connect their mathematics to what they wanted to accomplish. Another group has been working on soldering a display for STEM Land with N.


- A few Isai Ambalam (the other school I work with) children come to STEM Land on Sat (their day off). They just felt at home and the Udavi children took care of them as their own when they are here for the whole day. A couple of Auroville children have started coming to STEM Land once a week and were unfamiliar with the programming environment and some Udavi children sat next to them and worked and helped them when they were stuck and I was only called once for help during two sessions of 1-1/2 hrs that they worked here.

- N who has completed his undergrad in EE wanted to volunteer at STEM Land I asked him not to worry about teaching children and just focus on using STEM Land facilities for his own growth. When he started working he realized that children could do many more things than him and learnt from them. 
When we were opening STEM Land we split the opening speech in 2 min sections between four of us at Aura Auro and the children were cheering for each of the youth. When we had completed the children cheered and asked N also to speak. He said, he comes here to learn and have fun.

- A couple of other youth who graduated from Udavi also come in on Sat in the afternoons and engage with children or play abalone among themselves. I get back to Aura Auro at 2:00 so I wasn't quite sure what to do when the Isai Ambalam kids were here the first week and needed to stay later. The youth said don't worry I'll stay here and lock up once they leave. Next week the Isai Ambalam kids were telling me that they will lock up themselves!

What was accomplished this schooling year

Primary work has focused on classroom interventions in mathematics and problem solving in middle school 5^th-8^th grade. Many abstract concepts are grounded in middle school and if these are missed they leave gaps unfilled resulting in children having an aversion of mathematics and weak problem solving ability.

One of the aspects of work has been in making learning math fun and accessible for children while changing the perception of what mathematics is both for children and teachers. I had used puzzles, games, educational material, construction of models, electronics to make abstract learning tangible and provide application for children. This is documented in detail in the CriticalThinking_Report.pdf.

This academic year I focused on extensive use of technology starting with programming with Scratch with 6^th-8^th graders and mapping aspects of Math curricula through projects and challenges in programming. Three broad approaches were adopted for Math curricula through programming:

1. A set challenges for children that involved demonstrating their understanding of abstract concepts visually through programming including fractions, long division, pie charts e.g. demonstrating what it means to add numerator and numerator and denominator with denominator in a fraction and what is a meaningful way to add it.
2. A set of challenges were based using programming to understand mathematical ideas visually including linear expressions, percentages, simple and compound interest. As an example 5x+10 was graphed as rectangles of varying heights. Then shapes observed by varying the slopes or varying the added constants were observed and interpretations and explanations explored (stair cases of different kinds including making either the slope or constant a random variable, etc). This was then modified to investigate solutions to equations e.g. 5x+10=75 that used the expression and the pictures and paused when the result was reached.
3. Children created games that helped them understand a concept and then work on rigor to master an aspect including positive and negative integers, cube roots that resulted in two digit numbers. Once children get into the mode of creating their own programs often when the computer is available they do not drift and get carried away and play games, they tend to create them. If this is done step by step with values that they put in place first that they knew the answer of and then randomizing it they still want to be able to better their own programs.

Programming was also used in English to give life into the stories that the children had created by animating them in scratch. We worked on this project with two grades 7^th and 8^th. The 7^th graders had also used programming for math and their results in terms of how elaborate and complex they could make their stories even though they were younger and were attempting the stories the first time as well was interesting.

Beyond Mathematics and English, programming was taken further into sensing the real world using Makey, Makey. This helped children respond to a real life event like touching a plant, water or items with some moisture content (not complete insulators). Using this the children made their own version of a water tank filling alarm and a non-touch (pressure based) burglar alarm. These exercises helped children connect the programming to sensing the real world and think of applications where they can make use of these aspects in real life.

To complete the loop of controlling in the real world we also worked with the Finch robot and controlling the actions of the robot to go around obstacle courses and deliver small paper balls into goal buckets. The most popular game we created was the parking game with a random set of commands that made the robot move around and having to predict where the robot needs to be placed to reach a certain goal. We used this version at a school fair with success.

It should be mentioned that this approach is significantly different from ready-made material available for children like online lectures (those available in local language), or animation videos that are more or less passive. The so-called educational games that attempt to 'replicate' rigor use the same methodology of trying to get a high score used in the traditional system with the same pitfalls e.g. if given a choice children play games that they are already good at to get a higher score rather than stretch themselves with new games.

However, a paradigm shift is made when instead of trying to program the child through the computer, we let the children be in control and program the machine. In the first paradigm the computer is always right, the child is always a user and playing catch-up. In the second the children realize that the computer actually needs to be given step-by-step and can't make the simplest connections on its own.

It changes the dynamics of children using machines and their thought process in how they think of an action and break them down. It also helps children truly appreciate the amount of work that goes into making a computer look smart!

More interestingly the children learn a lot of implicit knowledge and conventions by using them e.g. the Cartesian system when trying to move their objects in the directions needed. Children who feel like failures with test scores in time bound examinations, persevere and feel proud when they are able to demonstrate their learning.

We also used physical technology primarily the DIY bigshot cameras that can be assembled by students and over 60 children from various grades assembled the cameras, took pictures and put them on the computer and then used instructions backwards to disassemble them for the next group to use them. The exercise of group work, reading and comprehending instructions and analyzing the pictures was interesting. The hand crank also gave a context to look into gears, ratios. A lot more could be done in optics, imaging. But, the children were very curious about the 3-D images taken by the camera and experimented quite a bit with depth.

The computer lab at Udavi, Makey, Makey, Bigshot cameras and the finch robot were donated by friends and visitors who saw the impact of technology on children and the interesting mathematics that the children were able to do. Further class notes and work of children is available at (www.smallisbeautiful.blogspot.com).

Just as the response of children to technology is obvious so is the lack of teachers who can play with this interesting resource and engage with children. This was especially true for teachers engaged with village children. As part of filling this gap I founded Aura Auro Design (www.auraauro.com) in collaboration with Aura Semiconductor Pvt. Ltd. this year. Aura Auro Design works with 3 electronics graduates and trains them in state of the art analog design (5 hrs a day) while engaging them for (3 hrs a day) to work with schools with a focus on learning through technology.

This has created a small team of local skilled and technically savvy youth who are learning and teaching at the same time. Aura Auro makes explicit that every teacher needs to be a learner.

It has also created a team that is working on STEM research in rural India to deliver results beyond what one person is capable of.

A new adventure...

It has been an exciting new adventure starting Aura Auro Design and having a team to work with on electronics, math and science. The fun in a team experimenting, learning and teaching at the same time is unparalleled.

There has been constant progress, discovery and fun.

We started the first month as more of a graduate school lab (this is we still call our work space) and finding roots in the schools I have been working with.

The youth spent some time drawing circles in Scratch using three different methods (tangents, Cartesian system, polar system) which helped in switching between Cartesian and Polar rigorous as a foundation to learn the theory of communication systems.

We also watched Ted talks, movies and met a few scientists. A sensory scientist trying to understand smell, taste, sensations; a scientist of climate change and one working on earth sciences. 

One Ted talk was by Clifford Stroll was about stoll through everything...a lovely video that took us to look at what we understand by wavelength and how things change as we go to high frequency especially RF design that we need to understand some day...

We have also been learning about fourier series, transforms, laplace transforms, filters, circuit elements resistors, capacitors, inductors. The youth have also been putting up notes on what they understand and have learnt on our blog.

We also attended the Stewardship for the New Emergence workshop that is about personal leadership (stewardship) - understanding oneself, connecting it with what you do and noticing the changes you want manifested in the world and aligning to it...

A lovely thing is that there is nothing basic we cannot talk about either in terms of what we can learn or new ways of looking at what we can work with children with.

We are now moving into the next phase where I stop being a the professor running a grad school lab and we transform the space to a lab for all of us to experiment and try things out (we just fixed an inverter!) look at ways to transform education systems we are part of and  handle our role with Aura Semiconductor Pvt. Ltd. with maturity, intelligence and as a team. 

More adventures coming soon as I restart blogging after a break of a couple of months...

Makey, Makey (4): Water level detection

With the 7th grade at Udavi I revisited the Makey, Makey a week later. I asked the ones who had used it earlier to demonstrate it to their friends who had missed it. The recall wasn't perfect and it gave a chance for them to debug.

Then we took it a step up and asked a different question, what application can we use the makey, makey for. Since it is able to detect the resistance of water we used it as a water level testing and then things got really interesting with them experimenting with their bodies in series with the water, etc.

Here is a video of the class that you can look at even if you have no clue what Makey, Makey is!

Makey, Makey – How it works...(3)

The day after the heavy rains we had an almost full strength in the 6^th grade at Udavi. The previous day only seven children had worked with the MM and it felt like a good exercise in observation and expression to see how these children described what they had seen. Based on their descriptions I asked children to write or draw what they felt had happened.

All the pics from the ones who had not come had a computer (or laptop) connected to a leaf/plant and apparently running Scratch and making a sound. The children in their excitement to describe the plants, sticks, communicating with the computer had not been able to describe the MM. However, in their own drawings the MM was present as a black box.

We had a discussion of what we see and observe and what we understand and interpret. Once I pulled out the MM the children were able to recall most of what they had seen, but they could not talk about what they interpreted as to what happened initially. As I gave them time, one aspect of the MM sending signals to the computer was brought forward as something they had not seen, but interpreted based on the reaction of the computer and the lighting up of the board when we touched something. The other aspect of understanding how the board was able to detect that it had been touched was ambiguous.

We went to the computer lab and I gave a 'magic show' with making the MM board respond or not respond to my touching by saying it before hand. The children were very focused on what my hands were doing and whether I was touching the banana gently or not as gently, etc and did not notice that in the times I wanted the MM to respond I was touching my legs to the floor. Once I explained the trick I was able to lift my foot off the floor and use the wire provided to connect to the board with the same effect. Then I made it further simpler by bypassing everything and directly connecting the ground to one of the trigger points and then talking about how the circuit is being closed even by me.

We then discussed why we don't see the same in real life of connecting a battery with a LED and holding the two ends to light it. This brought forward the sensitivity of the MM to detect even not so good conductors. Then we moved to what we saw the previous day with respect to plastic and wood and that even their resistance can drop when things are wet.

We concluded with what precautions a lineman should take when working on main lines. The kid of clothes that he should wear especially when it rains.

I then did the same session with the 7^th graders and was a little surprised that they were able to give all the signals given by the MM (space, click and four arrow keys). All their pictures highlighted MM and had it in this kind of detail. Thought when describing it in words they also cound not convey the MM. I then realized that since we have been working with scratch were able to understand not only that the MM sent some signals, but had perhaps read the code and noticed the signals.

I could, however, not pull the 'magic trick' on them. Almost immediately one hand went up and then within 10-15 sec three more went up on what I was doing with my foot. The loop closing made sense to the children and they went overboard asking me to use various chains of objects that would close the loop, e.g. touch this banana to the next, then to your keychain and then touch it.

We talked about possible uses of what we could do with a MM. The most common idea is a burglary alarm, but I'm hoping more ideas will come.

Makey all wet (2)

Monday morning, the rain had been very strong and I bicycled to Udavi and found many students were unable to make it. The new building had 6-7 kids in grades 4th, 5th and 6th. There were too few kids to take classes and I thought it would be a good opportunity to introduce the Makey, Makey (MM) board.

The MM board is able to integrate with real life objects (leaves, fruits, vegetables, plants) because of its ability to (measure very large resistances) be very sensitive to any resistive path. But, the sensitivity makes it misbehaves in the rain. It took me many attempts to figure out a mechanism to avoid a 'false' trigger. The wooden table that I wanted to use as base had imbibed some moisture and was itself triggering. We finally needed to hold the leaves and other material under test in the air.

When anyone touched the plant or leaf it would trigger scratch in producing a sound. As there were younger children I changed the sounds often. I also choose the sounds of animals (cats, dogs, etc) so the dog would bark when you touched the leaf, etc. The children were quite excited and I tried to tap into it to further inquiry.

What is happening? What do you see? What do you understand? What kind of objects will trigger the sound? We went from leaves, flowers, metal, to a stick of 'dry' wood, wooden blocks, and finally plastic! Everything triggered in the wet and moist conditions.

The plastic cap triggering was really a surprise, both for the children and for me and it was time to find a drier place. The rain then stopped and I took the 6th grade to the computer lab and was happy to find that the polished tables were able to present a dry environment where false triggers didn't happen.

The MM is able to close the circuit with a person without having to hold the earth wire (as indicated in the instructions) by using the floor and this makes thing appear more magical.

The class then continued with the 7th grade and we made a piano with bananas. The 7th graders have been working with Scratch and understood what was happening at a certain level of abstraction that they called the 'MM keyboard' vs the electronics keyboard that their program responded to.

Makey, Makey...(1)

At Isai Ambalam school we had set up the computer center and this year I was looking at how to best utilize this for the older children (6th and 8th graders) at the school. We have been working with Scratch programming for math concepts and more recently for creating games with English.

Regine is volunteering with us at the school and observed some of the classes got a very interesting gadget called the makey, makey from her friends to see what we could do with it in the school.

The idea of makey, makey is so simple that it adds to elegance of thought to come up with it. It notices if a circuit is complete and sends a signal to the computer that it knows well - the space bar, left, right, up, down arrow keys and a mouse click. Not very interesting in itself, but the subtle part is that it can detect even a large resistance closing the circuit. This makes it possible for it to detect a human body, a banana, a leaf, etc to close the circuit and lets it interact with objects from the outside world not associated with the computer.

The picture above is me playing a drum and a guitar string with each banana using Scratch.

Technically you need to hold one wire in your hand and play with the other hand. 
But, in our class the grounding of the computer room was quite good and since we leave our footwear out we were completing the circuit by simply letting our feet touch the ground. this meant that anyone could just touch the banana and get a space registered which meant in scratch could make a drum beat.

Of course the children were not convinced that it was the ground completing the loop and they pulled up their feet sitting on the plastic chairs and checked. Luckly the internet had been shut down due to heavy rains and we have to open scratch and create our own programs, choice of music and notes.
Once the kids were comfortable with what they were doing they asked the other teachers to come and try out the musical instruments.

Now, we will build on it and see what else is possible. One child has promised to work on a burglary alarm, another is making a full piano, lets see.

Electronics: Bigshot camera lessons

The gearbox on the bigshots gives an opportunity to dwell into the energy generation in the camera using a manual crank. I had already demonstrated that only at reasonable rotation of the handcrank the battery charges.

I wanted to give children something tangible to measure so I can connect it back to math (especially decimals as I am in the process of introducing these). For the measurements I needed to introduce the multi-meter. I started with the most exciting feature of the multi-meter, the continuity test and though I had not intended for it to become an entire class the children did not tire of getting materials that they thought would conduct or not conduct electricity. The most interesting choice of elements being magnets.

I next introduced DC voltages. I still find it amazing how much of electronics terminology is commonplace with children. They knew it was called Direct Current, but didn't know why. I called it a battery voltage. We measured various batteries and learnt how to read the voltage rating on the batteries.

With a bit of difficulty with water analogy I have started to use the body and flow of electricity to the flow of blood in the body and the battery as the heart that pumps the blood through the body. The voltage in this analogy is the pressure with which the heart pumps. Children relate it to when they are engaged in a physical activity and their heart pumps harder/faster.

We then measured the voltage of the rechargeable battery of the bigshot camera. We found it to be 4.1 V. The children summarized that what was charging this battery had to be greater than 4.1 V. They were quite surprised when they disconnected the battery measured the output of the PCB was 0 V. I then reminded them that that hand crank was disengaged. On rotating the hand crank they did get a voltage around 5 V (not loaded with battery). 

The Bigshot learning material talked about how the AC from the dynamo gets converted to DC for the battery. I felt that could be something fun to measure and realize the difference between DC and AC. I let the children measure with multi-meter still set in the DC mode for the children to see that an AC gives zero DC. We bypassed the PCB and directly measured the output of the dynamo. It was I who was in for a surprise, the meter read 9 V during one of the turns. I realized that it was only a small DC motor giving un-regulated DC voltage that was being regulated for the battery by the PCB. The pic below follows the link to the images:

I noticed that children are really struggling with indoor images and if you are absolutely still when taking the shot, you can get a few decent shots. Something I need to train the kids in.

A few children had done the demonstration for the class and I thought this was something they could all measure. I brought in few cameras assembled by other grades and we disassembled these cameras. The next day I split the class in groups of two and gave the choice to do the measurement or to assemble the camera. Its little surprise the children wanted to assemble the camera. This was the smallest (2 in a group) and youngest group I had given the task to and they went about it quite nicely. I also found the first broken part (a tooth of gear C) and  the first missing part (an axle) after all the assembling and disassembling by the children.

One interesting mixup was when one group accidentally connected the battery to the dynamo. The hand crank started to rotate and the kids were spooked. Well, it did confirm that we were working with a DC motor as a generator. Here are some images from the assembly:

Children building a Speedometer/odometer

For Monday morning every week I have been working with few four kids from Deepanam on electronics and Arduino based projects. These kids were up for bicycling to the electronics lab in Udavi.

After tinkering around a few things we finally decided to build a speedometer for the cycles. One and a half hours a week was not getting us there and I let them access the lab for 1-1/2 hrs more as I merged the class with 6th grade electronics-mathematics classes in the lab.

For the speedometer the first work was on the LCD display. We first got a 16x2 that got burnt because the kids wired it one pin off and switched supply and ground. We then used a 16x1 which actually needs to be accessed as a 8x2 and eventually the next order of 16x2 came in. The lesson of the switched supply as well learnt as the displays have been hooked on and off tens of times without loosing another display.

We planned to measure the rotations of the cycle using a reed switch. (A reed switch has two metal wires placed in such a way that if a magnet gets close it would close the connections).
Unfortunately the experience with the reed switch was comic almost approaching tragic proportions. We only had a couple of appropriate reed switches. I had a couple from Bangalore, but once we got the first working (perhaps) it looked good enough to be stolen off the bike. The second was burned out when both ends of the reed switches were connected between power and ground. We soldered a couple of really delicate reed switches and put them in ball pen refill for protection. Two of those broke off because the magnet was too strong and the reed switch wire just kicked off its glass body to join the magnet. We finally seem to have one that has lasted a couple of weeks, but its still the weak link.

We calibrated the rotations by printing the frequency measured based off the switch with a multimeter measuring Hz. We also realized that using pin13 for reading was convenient as it showed when the switch got close to the magnet with the built in LED on the board.

 

For the software, a basic polling routine worked fine for reading the reed switch and we didn't encounter a limit of the speed of the routing even when we were spinning really fast (or tricking it with a jitter around where the magnet activates the reed switch). Using the radius of the cycle both the speed and the distance are reported. We made some optimizations to avoid rewriting the fixed letters.

Apprentices of electronics class

 I kept some time aside to prepare (on Tue) for Xth grade electronics classes at Udavi (on Thu). One of my colleagues asked if I could use an apprentice for that slot. I took up the offer and soon realized that I had picked up one more opportunity to stretch myself - prepare for the Xth class and and find a way to engage Ab. I merged the two for some time working on the demos for the Xth graders e.g. on how AC becomes DC through rectification (half-wave and full wave), then filtering, then the load creating ripples connecting it to regulators. I also was able to use help for checking the connections of counters with seven segment displays. 

When En joined I felt that I needed to create a small independent project that they owned and delivered on. I had received a request for a buzzer circuit that could be used in the school fair that when two wires touched will get triggered and stay on. I thought it would be a good (and challenging) design exercise for them.

 

They attempted to build it on bread board, but had limitations with the relay integrating well into the bread board. They tried to solder a wire on the relay, but got cold solders and the wire would fall off. I let them work through their struggles and once I realized they had understood the components and an intermediate solution even asked them to present it to the 6th graders I work with. In that class, they really seem to notice that they were 'getting it' themselves.

As we were getting towards the end of the year I asked them to direct me step-by-step and offered to do the soldering for them. Once we were done with a basic design of a relay and a switch in series it only buzzed when the wires were touched. I tried to let them explore the puzzle of making it work with a single wire. They couldn't get it and I showed them the positive feedback. As we talked about how it worked Ab came back with, 'oh, that's clever'.

Of course, as all real things in design the circuit did not immediately work and we got down to debugging it by measuring voltages at different parts of the circuit before finally realizing that one of the traces connecting two nodes had got burnt out due to soldering and de-soldering.

It was even more interesting that the circuit worked the first time, but the second time as soon as the switch was turned on, even before wire W1 and W2 were touched to each other the buzzer went off. Can you figure out why? 

We found a work around by connecting the W2 to ground before starting and I realized that I could have asked them to add a diode, but the complexity seemed just right for them and I left it with their understanding of the issue and the work around.

We had a conversation for completion:

How do you feel?
Ab: Happy
En: Like I learnt a lot of things
Me: Complete

What is the first thing that comes to mind about what you learnt in this class?
Ab: Seven segment displays
En: Relay

The second?

Ab: Multi-digit seven segment displays!
En: Piezo buzzer

What would you was missing in the classes?
Sometimes the classes were hard. Would have liked to do a remote controlled car as well. 

Here is them giving a demo of the circuit without realizing that I had turned on the video well in advance ;) - 

Electronic Math classes

As the Electronics lab has become established I have started to take in kids from 6th and 7th grade for an Electronics class in one Math class a week. The kids have been pushing me to include some electronics in their 'curriculum' and when I found one of them in 7th grade trying to make a lemon battery in my class I could not let go of the opportunity. I usually take half the class and let the others continue with the worksheets with the Math teacher.

For the lemon battery they had a small piece of zinc that had been broken out off an old battery casing. They had wound it to a copper wire.

We talked about a new quantity voltage that gives in the water analogy the height of the water it is raised to and measured what we got from the lemon it was around 0.7 V. One kid was consistently able to find out which end is at a higher potential by putting the leads in their mouth. He said that the side he got the shock from was positive. I didn't try it out, but it was accurate every time I asked him.

We sawed through a battery carefully into two disposing off the material inside into a box and then flattening out the zinc plates. We then cut them into strips that we can use.

We talked about an LED and how unlike a light bulb it works only one way. Most kids have salvaged some LEDs from somewhere and are somewhat familiar with them. We started talking about ways (including the use of the multimeter) of figuring out which way it should be connected. We found four. The length of the leads (if available), the cut on the LED, the shape inside the LED and using a multimeter in the continuity setting. I then told them that they needed more than two 2V to light up an LED.

We used both his lemons and were still around 1.3 V still short of lighting the LED, as we had no other lemons I used a 1.5 V C battery in series. It got us to 2.8 V and enough to light the LED and light it did. Then we tried to squeeze out the lemon juice in bottle lids and were able to get enough voltage in four lids to light the LED.

I built on the experience with a few Xth grade kids as they created sets of wires with copper wire soldered on one side and a zinc plate on the other. I used this with the 6th graders. With 4 lemons and 6 kids it was fun exercise. They connected up two and when they hooked up the third the voltage went down. Then they started talking about negative numbers and remembered that the polarity is actually important and its otherwise like adding a negative number. I couldn't have come up with a better example of a negative decimal number than the one they created. I considered making a game of it, but the kids looked too serious to disturb so I let them at it till they got enough voltage to light the LED and look quite satisfied with themselves.

The other aspect that was easy to address was conversions from milli of a quantity to a whole e.g. mV -> V. This happens quite naturally as they try to interpret the results given from the multimeter based on the range they put it in.

I've also had a few lec-dems using an oscilloscope to explain the differences between AC and DC.

Don't panic

A funny incident happened a few weeks back.
One of the students had come to the lab over a holiday to learn soldering. He had been soldering a bus of wires LED 7-segment to a connector and it had looked like the wires would short to each other. He spent an hour being systematic, cleaning the solder tip, using the flux, solder reasonably and redid the bus connections neatly and plugged it into the Arduino.
We were using the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) laptop to program the Arduino and when he uploaded the code into the Arduino, it blinked a zero and the whole board died (shut down). He looked aghast.
We disconnected the board and I worked with him to solder a 9 V battery clip to a connector so we can power the Arduino off this. When all was done we plugged in the battery and the Arduino woke up counting the numbers as expected.
What had happened was the OLPC USB was unable to supply the current required by both the Arduino and seven segment display and had a overload protection that turned it off.
He asked me how I was calm. I told him I just told myself 'don't panic'. He said he that he was glad that I didn't tell him the same as he every time he has been told that was a time to panic!

Organized chaos...

As the electronics lab has been getting better equipped and I have also started working with children at different grades and from different schools at the lab. This has given me a chance to spend more time at the lab, work on different projects and also get more confident on handling larger groups. Here is a look at how the Xth grade electronics classes morphed over time:

1) One area: I had started classes by asking everyone to work on one thing on a bread board e.g. getting a seven segment display to work with a counter, using the 555 timer to generate a clock. The classes were somewhat structured with at least 1/3 of the time being white board based. This helped in getting the ground rules of how to read the pin configurations of ICs, LED displays and how to go about connecting them together. It gave a clear focus to the class and helped me give instructions that could be helpful to many students at the same time. It was easy to manage their questions as they were limited. 

I also used to throw in, one new thing a class, e.g. thermocouple, demo of AC-DC, that kept the interest of doing something new each class.

However, with just one thing to work on it was difficult to keep the interest of the entire class and about 1/3 of the class were not always present: either there was an enthu cutlet in their group that did all the work, or it was not engaging enough for a student in a class and the lights were on but nobody was home.

2) Chaos Rules: To break the monotony of highly structured classes I had attempted letting people take anything in the lab and open it up. For about two or three classes the students opened, pried, de-soldered on old TV screen and whatever other equipment I had accumulated over the yrs. The TV bore the brunt of their salvaging and they extracted the enamel wire from its various components with much glee :). There was a marked difference in the confidence of children to build something, knowing that if something went wrong, they could always take it apart. 

Although, this gave them a sort of undo button, beyond that not much happened. They didn't necessarily want to know more than the name of something the pulled out (as they were not using it). Is this something good to remove? 

Yes, its a high voltage capacitor, it can take up to 200 V.

Great, whatever, lets desolder it.

After a couple of these classes I sat the group down and asked them to list what they had learnt. They said they enjoyed it and learnt how to take something apart, but it stopped there.

3) Two projects: As we started working on the Arduino I transitioned to two section classrooms. In hardware I asked them to solder what they had built before a seven segment display to a counter and wire it up so that it had a common interface. I had asked the software group to wire up the display with resistors to the Arduino so they could count inside and display the digits.

One of my goals was to demonstrate the difference between hardware and software. With the hardware I wanted to string a bunch of counters and show that you can, in principle, extend it beyond what Arduino is capable of (limited by number of outputs). For the software group, I had planned to count backwards as well and demonstrate flexibility that software provides when used along with hardware.

They learnt to solder with a clear goal. The software group that was wiring just the LED with resistors with the Arduino were able to get their projects to work in a couple of classes. The tricky part for them was to take the wires and order them as a bus and solder them to a connector. Soldering wires to a 1 space apart connector is a real test of soldering and their work got neater over time.

The hardware group that had to do the wiring realized that it was much more difficult than breadboarding. As they were learning soldering only one of them was able to complete the board completely and they used the solder for too long and the counter chip burned out.

I was able to order some general purpose PCBs with horizontal tracks which would make the connections much more easy and one group that had really put their heart into this has taken up and are doing it again with the new boards.

4) Organized Chaos:

After some introspection, I felt that the kids still wait for me to walk them through every step of the way and my time becomes the limiting factor on how much gets done. I felt they had learnt enough to warrant more independent work. 

Over the last three classes I broke the class into groups that were clear about what they wanted to do and started chipping at the rest of the students who had not been as involved.

I have fundamentally changed my attitude to allow myself to be less useful and let the students explore more (ok struggle) on their own while giving a general direction or goal. 

Here is an example of what they did in the last class:

1) There are a few kids who have taken what they do more seriously and are working with the Arduino to build an instrument to detect the speed of falling objects. 

2) Another is building the electronics for a model of a traffic light (R, Y, G) coupled with a timer that counts down the time with 2 or three digits (again with the Arduino).

3) There is a game to take a loop across an electronics maze and one group is working on a buzzer that will trip and keep ringing once a wire touches the maze (till it is disabled).

4) One group is working on soldering a counter in hardware with counters. They were the closest to finishing the soldering assignment but their chip burnt out due to excess heat. They are now learning how to use sockets and put the  chip in once they finish soldering.

5) Two groups were working on two solar torches that I have from friends that I fixed, but the batteries had gone into deep discharge that the solar panels could not recharge. They tried to understand the panels, measured the voltages and tried to replace the panels with power sources that would charge the battery. Hopefully, once they charge the batteries we can re-engage the panels and things would work.

6) One student is working on trying to get an inverter to work. He fixed the fuse, tried to fix an LED that was bust, but it bust again. This week he learnt about relays (from group 3) and was able to check that those still work on the inverter.

Given the limited time  (1-1/2 hrs a week) that these students have, perhaps, there can only be learning if they are motivated, exploring and thinking on their own. Progress has been slow, but I can feel the progress. Here are some conversations I overheard and had with the students:

1) One student in group 5 telling another - I'm fixing something real, this is one class I really felt I am accomplishing something.

2) Student: Sanjeev we were able to do nothing this class. Why can't you spend more time with us?

Me: Really. You didn't learn to compile code and write into the Arduino.

Student: You didn't help so I had to figure it out by myself. But, that's not learning.

Me: How about what to do with the LDRs?

Student: You just gave us the sensors and asked us to figure it out. We were so confused. We just characterized the LDRs with and without light and know that it changes from 3 kOhm to almost an open. We are not sure how to use it, but if we put it in series with a 10kOhm resistor we get from 1.5 V to 4.5 V.

Me: Ok, do you think it can be better?

Students: We don't know, but maybe if we increase the 10kOhm resistor and lower the lower voltage. This will help the Arduino trigger properly as it needs as close to 0 and as close to 5V as possible. We can't really explain it, can you explain what's going on....conversation proceeds right through snacks break, but they don't care and want to get it right in the next class. I skip snacks too. 

I am having a conversation about design choices (granted simple ones) with Xth grade students from a school catering to village children. Feels like progress to me. 

Finally some pics from my class.

Udavi School Xth Grade Electronics