Hands on Session on Math Concepts

~ Vimal & Praba

An interactive and engaging session was held for the STEM Land  mathematics teacher for showing Off Math concepts with Mr.Ravi Aluganthi. We as a team of Two worked on building a model to demonstrate the Pythagoras Theorem. We learnt the tools of trade of model building. Also learnt about the techniques for building the model. Through this session, we understand the mathematical concepts in a better manner than through the textbooks. We shall work on building the same kind of models to demonstrate the difficult to show math topics to enable the kids learn easier. We are very grateful to Mr.Ravi for his valuable support and help in our learning path.

 

 

Powers of Three

-Pratap & Logeshwari

Children from 8th  in Udavi were learning about the powers and exponents.  In order to demonstrate powers of three. I was thinking about how to make the cubes and I had a question of with what materials do I need to make.

Image result for dienes blocks

Finally, I thought of making the cube using Dienes blocks. I took all the 10 cm rods and started. making making the cubes. I wanted to show  31  to  35.

I took a 10 cm rod and cut them into 3 pieces of  3 cm. I stuck them together to get 3^2. when I add three of the 3^2 I get 3^3.

This the visual representation of 3^1

 

 

 

 

 

This the visual representation of 3^2
 This the visual representation of 3^3

This the visual representation of 3^4

This the visual representation of 3^5

Here are some simple rules to use with exponents.

  1. a1 = a
    Any number raised to the power of one equals the number itself.
  2. For any number a, except 0, a0 = 1
    Any number raised to the power of zero, except zero, equals one.
  3. For any numbers a, b, and c,
    ab x ac = ab+c

    This multiplication rule tells us that we can simply add the exponents when multiplying two powers with the same base.

The above is a visualizing 3 power n in three dimensions. We did the same for two-dimension also.

We had a session with Ravi Alungati with all the teachers who work on Mathematics. Everyone chose their own topic that they are working on. Pratap and I chose powers since the eighth graders are working on it. We built these two dimensions of representation using the cardboard. We marked the cardboard cut them and painted them in alternate colors.

Two-dimension model for 3^2
Two_dimenstion model for 3^3

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

STEMland Activity

~Saranya and Poovizhi

I and 7th grade children worked on Aravind Gupta toys. I and  Pranauv watched video on how to make puppet toy and we worked on it together  and we able to complete it. Here are the some snapshot of puppet.

 

 

 

 

Government school teachers visiting STEMland 

~ Arun

Government school teachers from Cuddalore visited STEMland a couple of weeks back. Lakshmi who works for Tata consultancy was inspired by the model of STEmland and she has been engaging with us since then.

We are working on a project right now called “mobile STEMland”. The idea is to carry teaching materials from schools to schools and teach math and science (This is ongoing).

Lakshmi is also interested to implement the idea in a government school in Cuddalore. As part of this, the math teachers and the school Headmaster from the school visited us. Children and STEMland facilitators showed some of the projects they did and also briefly brainstormed what STEMland is about. As part of their visit, we also conducted a session for them on “Stand and Fears “(A tool from Stewardship programme).

For more info on Stewardship programme, please see

  1. http://wiki.auroville.org.in/wiki/SAIIER_2019:Stewardship_for_New_Emergence
  2. http://smallisbeautiful.blogspot.com/2014/03/stewardship-for-new-emergence-monica.html
  3. http://www.auraauro.com/research/epi8-proceedings-full.pdf

The teachers gave us positive feedback and wanted to implement this in their school.

NON NEWTONIAN FLUID

~ Madhavan, Arun

non-Newtonian fluid is a fluid that does not follow Newton’s law of viscosity, i.e., constant viscosity independent of stress. In non-Newtonian fluids, viscosity can change when under force to either more liquid or more solid. [more..]

PREPARATION : 

Preparation of the non Newtonian liquid:

Needed materials:

  1. Corn powder (50 gm)
  2. Water (50 ml)
  3. Shampoo (5 ml)
  4. Honey (1 table spoon)

Mix all the ingredients slowly and make sure you mix them properly. Mixing might be a little harder and might take around 10 to 15 minutes.

WORKING :

After the preparation of the liquid ,the surface looks like a liquid. When one puts a finger slowly into the liquid it will go inside. When we increase the speed of our hand our finger will not go inside. Please check the video below. We should this to the school children.

Scratch project on cube

~ ranjith

Here I have created project to show that solid shapes is made up of infinity sheet of surface in scratch. It helps children to understand the relation between area of square and volume of cube by looking at this program.

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/368412131

Run this program in turbo mode “press: shift + green flag ”

Unit digit of a cube number

-Logeshwari

8th graders in Udavi School were learning about the squares and cubes. This is a simple scratch project to show the unit digit of cube of a number.

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/366990201/

Fraction multiplication V2

Link to V1 : 

From the STEMland scaling session with Swathi on Friday, the input received was to make the multiplication to be a perfect square to show that 1/4 is smaller than 1/3.

Murali from 9th grade implemented the change:

 

Session on Pi

~ Abilash

An interactive session was  given to the young students of TLC about Pi,  radius, diameter, area, and circumference. The class started with a brief introduction about each of the concept.

Later the students were asked to measure the circumference of the different objects that were given to them and which they found around them using a thread. The measured circumference was divided by the diameter of the same object, when divided they got some value near to 3.14.  From this session they were able to understand that the value of Pi and it is constant. The students were engaged and practically understood the concept of Pi, which they enjoyed a lot.

 

Arduino Extension for Scratch 3.0

Scratch 3.0 doesnot have the standard extension to interface with the popular open source physical computing platforms like Arduino. An extension was build to communicate with the arduino platform. Arduino Uno needs to be flashed with the firmata firmware from the examples. The scratch communicates with the arduino through a intermediate tool developed using the pyfirmata library of the python. This tool helps the kids to learn physical computing concepts easily. This same framework can be used for research on Human Computer Interaction. Also for building tangible devices. The customized version of the Scratch 3.0 and the Scratch linking software called ScratchBridge is released in the github page:https://github.com/vimal-b/scratch4arduino/releases/tag/1%2C0