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...

Finch flops @ fair

As I was recovering from Dengue I was still weak and could not travel to Udavi. I had however received the Finch robot as a gift from Gaurav. It had been a lot of fun to use it and program it for a task (drop a paper ball into a basket) at the Isai Ambalam school. When Poorna school children visited Isai Ambalam they also had a lot of fun programming the Finch to do such a task.

Udavi school organizes a school fair a day before Christmas and some of the children from Isai Ambalam had gone for it the previous year. This year they were asked to put up a stall and the children decided that they would do a stall with Finch. Given that it was the coolest gadget, we already had it made and just needed to show up. Of course in the dry run of designing a challenge and making it happen with teams in the class it took us half an hour...I took the precaution of going to Udavi a couple of days and introducing working with the Finch. My class at Udavi was even upset that I was letting the Isai Ambalam children set up a stall with Finch, instead of them.

D-day the children put up a stall with the game of asking people to program the Finch to start in one location and park in another while avoiding hitting obstacles. People were happy watching the Finch demo, but not many were biting. Only the children from Udavi who had worked with me gave it a try. Some were curious and watched, but very few were in the frame of mind to give it a shot. Soon the obstacles were removed, the problem made simpler, yet the crowd stayed thin watched a demo and walked away. 


Arham had also come to the fair and I was walking around with him trying out various games - dropping a coin in water to a target, tossing a ball to pass through a hoop, kicking a football through a tire, tumbling a tower with balls, rolling a table tennis ball on two ropes and dropping it into the bucket, hitting a ball coming out of a pipe. I walked back to my team after an hour to realize that they looked exhausted and it was because of lack of interest and the effort it took to write in the program.


I realized that most of the games that didn't involve luck involved prediction...watching something happen and trying to correct to make something else happen. It reminded Daniel Wolpert's very interesting TED talk about how our brains evolved primarily to help us move dexterously through prediction (its a fun talk, well worth the 20 minutes). The ease of prediction and correction was missing in our game and hence not in sync with the rest of the fair. What was fun and exciting in a "serious" classroom setting had fallen flat in the light of "real fun". 

An hour and quarter had almost passed (in a two hour fair) we needed to change the game drastically. The new game was this, a random program was written to make the Finch move around a bit. As a user you needed to predict where to place the Finch in order for two wheels of the finch to come on the parking pad. You had two attempts. Once someone solved the problem the program was changed. 
Having to choose location and orientation alone seemed doable and a fair crowd built up at the stall. You could wait and watch someone did to have a better shot at solving the puzzle, but you took the risk of someone solving it before you.

While most games were running out of steam since children and people had already tried them the Finch stall was heating up. The stall running about 15 mins after the fair stipulated time and children played even though the center where tokens (we gave out on completing the challenge) were exchanged for gifts, had closed.

The fact that the game was salvaged in the end seemed to have stayed with the children as they seemed pretty happy with their stall and wrote about how successful it was once we changed the game. A few Udavi children who had stayed till the end asked me to book the game for them for the next years fair.

The finch robot : Programming (1)

Programming with Scratch has been getting more interesting with interacting with the real world with the makey-makey that was able to let the computer receive signals from bananas and vegetables. Gaurav's gift of a Finch robot gave a way for children to control something that happens in the real world.

The setup on Ubuntu 14.04/Scratch 2.0 worked with the given guide. 

I explained and demonstrated the sensors, played with its nose light and then we got down to making the finch move. In the initial exercise I was trying to get the children to move the finch around in a certain order, but what made it interesting was to try to move a crumbled paper ball around and put it in a basket without the Finch falling off.

The finch has two wheels that are controlled independently with (two) motors. The only input possible is a speed from -100 (backward) to +100 (forward). In order to rotate an object, for example, you need to move one wheel faster than the other. Also, since we had not figured a direct relation between the speed and a specific distance there was some guess work involved in the time that it needs to be done for.

The phases involved in solving the problem involved in drawing out what they wanted and what speeds in which wheels for how long will be involved in doing so. The wheels were a little wobbly and even when the two speeds were exactly the same the finch had a bit of a drift to one side. But, that just added to the challenge :).

I split the students in groups of 3 or 4 to allow for discussion and team work. The game was to be able to do it in the least number of attempts. I noticed that groups were not that keen on observing what another group was doing as they wanted to only follow their own program to avoid confusion. But, since my purpose was for them to start predicting the outcome I provided an incentive of an extra attempt if a group predicted the outcome accurately. This got the groups interested in examining each others work as well.

After a couple of attempts the children started to really get into the idea of predicting what a set of instructions is going to do and how to go about solving the puzzle. The reality of a paper crushed into a ball is that it didn't always move with the finch and kept things interesting. Its interesting that while children keep track of the number of tries, etc none of this really matters and the first time a ball falls into a box the children want to do the next puzzle.

The ideas of rotation, positive negative numbers, speed, timing were reiterated. In addition problem solving by prediction, verification and correcting what they were doing and the idea of learning from what happens rather than it just being right/wrong was an aspect looked into.