Inspiration “Secret of concentration”

~ Sundar, Murali, Naveen

Transferred to the next group this week 🙂 , and worked on the secret of Concentration.

The following passages were translated to Tamil and read with the children in both English and Tamil.

From the teachings of Swami Vivekananda :

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To me the very essence of education is concentration of mind,not the collecting of facts.If i had to do my education over again,and had any voice in the matter,i would not study facts at all.I would develop the power of concentration and detachment,and then with a perfect instrument i could collect facts at will.

How has all the knowledge in the world been gained but by the concentration of the powers of the mind?The world is ready to give up its secrets if we only know how to knock,how to give it the necessary blow.The strength and force of the blow come through concentration.There is no limit to the power of the human mind.The more concentrated it is,the more power is brought to bear on one point;that is the secret.

Do you see,simply by the observance of strict brahmacharya(continence)all learning can be mastered in a very short time-one has an unfailing memory of what one hears or knows but once.It is owing to this want of continence that everything is on the brink of of ruin in our country.

Herein is the difference between man and the animals-man has the greater power of concentration.The difference in their power of concentration also constitutes the difference between man and man.Compare the lowest with the highest man.The difference is in the degree of concentration.This is the only difference

Take one idea,Make that one idea your life;Think of it,dream of ir,live on that idea.Let the brain,muscles,nerves,every part of your body,be full of that idea,and just leave every other idea alone.This is the way to success,and this is the way spiritual giants are produced.Others are talking machines.

How are we to know that the mind has become concentrated?Because the idea of time will vanish.The more time pass unnoticed the more concentrated we are.In common life we see that when we are interested in a book we do not note the time at all; and when we leave the book,we are often surprised to find how many hours have passed.


During the whole week(201906 22-29) and the sleep over the children worked on creating their own drawings and depicted the following story.

Group members: Shakthi, Murali, Ajay, Kalai, Jagathishwari, Sundar(Newcomer), Adhiyaman, Hemavarshini, Parimila, Stella

link to PDF: Arjuna Secret of Concentration

20190706 – children creating their own presentations:

link to PDF: Secret of Concentration V1

Recitation work from the children:

Recitation Presentation

tamil english  translation text

2019/08/17 One liner for our passages

1.Concentration is the essence of all knowledge, a trained mind never makes a mistakes.
2.Collecting facts with the power of concentration and detachment is the essence of education.
3.The world is ready to give up its secrets and the idea of where to look for comes through concentration.
4,All learning can be mastered in a short time by following the code of strict Bramacharya which involves immense concentration.
5.The difference between human beings is in their degree of concentration.
6.You will know that the mind has become concentrated, when the idea of time has vanished.
7.Success in life depends on clear thinking and intellectual understanding which is inherited by the power of concentration.

2019/08/31

The teachers and children together worked on scripts to show all the seven points as a play.

Link to Document: Script secret of concentration

 

Inspiration

At Isaiambalan school a project on value with Swammy Krishnan Maharaj was started last week(20190615) and children along with teachers were split into six groups each with a specific title . Our group was given the topic “True Education” whose avatar was “Narasimha”. Each group had a set of values and their corresponding meaning in terms of the groups name.

The following was ours:

1. Respect: Respect your parents, teachers, and elders
2. Love: Love your Country, your culture and your ancestors
3. Self Discipline: Discipline your body, your senses and our mind.
4. Self Control: Control your words, your thoughts and your actions.
5. Faith:Have faith in yourself, in others an in god.
6. Discrimination: Discrimination between good and bad, real and unreal, vice and virtue.
7. Concentration: Concentrate whole heartedly while studying or playing.
8. Truthfulness: Be truthful in words and actions.
9. Hard work : Work hard to acquire knowledge, skills, and wisdom.
10. Strength : Be strong physically, mentally, intellectually, morally, and spiritually.
11. Conviction: Have conviction in the power of goodness, purity, and honesty
12. Devotion: Have devotion for duty, scriptures, holy people and God.
13. Habits : Cultivate regular habits of prayer, meditation, and reading inspiring and strengthening literature.
14. Same Sightedness: Feel the presence of the divine in all beings and treat them with the same standard as you treat yourself.
15. Firm Determination: Have firm determination strong will power to cultivate good habits in order to achieve permanent happiness, peace, success and fulfillment in life.

Children were asked to write what they understood of these and we shared in group what it meant for each person and translated it to Tamil.

Today(20190622) we read the story of Prahlada and the children were asked to reflect on it by next Saturday.

Link to story : Prahlada

During sleep over (26/06/2019) our team drawn the story. In that story we captured the main thing and drew it. Whatever question we had regarding the story we asked and it got clarified by Anita. On saturday (29/06/2019) we discussed the question we came up and it got clarified. We started preparing the script for drama. We wrote a script with help of our children and teachers.

to be cont..

Group members : Saranya, Kishore, Pravin Kumar, Vasiga, Monkia, AasisKumar, Jagathambal, Sanjith, Prajan, Vimal and Sundar

Installing R on Ubuntu 64x

edit /etc/apt/sources.list
paste deb https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu trusty-cran35/
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install r-base (first uninstall if already older version R base is installed using sudo apt-get remove r-base)
sudo apt-get install r-base-dev
sudo apt-get install r-base-dev
Y or I : install the package maintainer's version

Programming4matheducator Day 8

Day 8:

The day started with reflections from the previous day and then Integrity lens was introduced, Poovizhi handled the session.

Then the teachers presented their projects.

The closing for the workshop began with creating my new narrative with drawing our hands and coloring in values which we stood for. Then it was passed on to all the participants and they each wrote what they saw in us. Once everyone got their sheet back it was amazing to read all the values.

Then we broke for lunch and the session came to a closure, but the participants had requested to conduct a session on Arduino with snap.

Then the Arduino was introduced (Digital and analog pins) the task was to make an LED blink for one second. Then to blink 3 LEDs consecutively. Once that was too achieved fading the LED was done. The participants had a sense of accomplishment with wires and bread boards and LEDs. Then Ram stood up and gave a spiel of thanks for the organization team and invited us to Sitiling.

Reducing fraction to its lowest form

The following scratch program asks and reduces a random fraction generated to its lowest form. The code uses mod function to check and evaluate if the numerator and denominator can be divided without any remainders by a certain given number by the user. At the same time a pictorial representation of the fraction is drawn so as to see all the reduced parts are equivalent and look the same.

Triangle inequality rule

We were working with area and construction of triangles with the 6th graders in Isaiambalam school initially children started to construct a triangle with compass on their note books. Then to make things a little interesting children were asked how they would do it in scratch.

They initially started to draw three sides and found out that is was only possible to do, when the user gave three sides and two angles. Then one of then came up with using the arc function. He first drew the base, then two circles with the radius as the other two sides. Now he got the intersection point,  by this time I was confused as of how to get the third point in scratch. The solution was tracing the distance from one circles center to the other circles circumference and when they meet to set a variable to the x and y location and that did it.

Link to scratch code : link to program

More work done by children at Isaiambalam School :

Shapes and angles with 5th grade

 

 

AV Marathon ’19

The Auroville marathon ’19 took place on Feb 10 it had started early in the morning ~ 5AM for the full marathoners, and by 7 AM the 10 km was about to start and the STEMLand team had gathered near the start line.

From left to right (Arun, Saranya, Sundar, Poovizhi, Ranjith, Sanjeev, Abilash, Pratap, Sandhiya, Logeshwari, Murali)

During the run;

Mission Accomplished;

Some Reflections;

“It was my first AV marathon. 10 km seemed to be a long distance and i thought i won’t make it.But with a couple of days practice in the morning(3.5 km) helped me to complete the whole 10 km. We started at 7.15 AM, The first 2 km I didn’t stop anywhere but later took few breaks as my legs started to cramp. Arun and I ran the whole 10 km together talking to each other and motivating each other that we can make it to the finish line. We both completed the run in 1hr 20mins which was quite impressive as we didn’t practice much and was my first marathon.Finally it was a great experience and i felt really happy that my entire team completed the marathon successfully.”~Murali

(There was a open event organized for all age participants it was a 5 km run/walk, a lot of children had participated in this event)

“Last time I thought that I will complete 10 Km without practicing but I got some allergy so I couldn’t complete. So this time I decided to run 5 km and to complete it. There were lot of small children who were running the 5 km. Before starting I was little hesitate and was afraid to run with the small children. Then I felt I should not compare my self with anyone. Since I have committed to my team that I will run 5 Km and I started my running. I remembered what Sanjeev told about how to run. I kept that in my mind and slowly started running. I didn’t want to stop any where and I was continuously running and I was able to complete in 17 minutes and came 3rd”. ~ Pratap

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some reflections from the team;

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Learning scratch

The 7th graders (2018-2019 batch) had stepped in for their Mathematics class for the first time in STEMland this year.  They took their own time and became familiar with filling their weekly plan and updates on the laptops. They saw their seniors work on projects and were eager to learn, some of them took the courage to approach and did learn a few blocks in scratch and got the feel of it, but had a little hard time on expanding their code. They often started to play around with the back ground painting and changing colors of sprites, but the coding part was still a little confusing.

The previous batches had a guidance course into scratch and that had kicked started their projects.  I had thought to do something of this type and get the current batch flexible with programming too. Then as a team we decided to create diversity in the class and put up an announcement for all those who were interested in attending the course to sign up. 5th graders from Isaimambalam had shown interest and 8th graders from Udavi along with the interns in STEMLand the course began.

All the participants were eager to code and make the computer do what they want rather the vice versa. Pairs were made on a mix up of boys and girls, young ones and elders, interns and students. Each day started with a focused goal and how to broaden it when attained and make the program more flexible. Girls were eager in writing their scripts and explaining their program at the end of day or beginning of the next session on the main screen. Some children did not want to move on to the next task unless they had completed the current one to their satisfaction, and took extra time and involved in making their program more stable.

Through the course the children had learnt to use the pen function and through this draw regular shapes. Once they knew the basics they made the same program dynamic and used ‘for loops’ to show all the shapes starting from an equilateral triangle to square, pentagon, hexagon, heptagon, octagon, nonagon, and decagon.

The children had learnt importing and exporting of sprites (arc function to draw arcs in practical geometry, writing sprites to print on the screen)

Then they were divided into teams and created a game based on sensing objects or colors (similar to a maze game but when sprite touches a wall or unwanted object the game resets)

The children were given feedback forms, and the reflections were showing that they all are more confident now than before in doing projects with scratch. They also mentioned as teams they were able to learn and help each other more.

Towards the end all children had made a number of projects to show what they had learned through the course. This was a stepping stone for them to continue and make projects based on their curriculum to project their mastery over a concept.

At present the children have come up with new projects, e.g. Abinash, Shakthikannan have created projects in measurements. While Murali took it to the next level and is doing a project from out of his syllabus (a+b+c)^2. This has inspired others and Guna sundari, Yuvan, Jeeva, Jannani, Anisha have started to expand from (a+b)^2