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.