2016 Review – Bala, Sundar

2016 has been a challenging year for me both mentally and physically. I am able to see the difference in myself as compared to the previous year where I was literally a novice both at work and as a person.

My biggest learning at work is that I have found out ways to be more efficient and efficacious, be it automating work or asking other people for help. The two weeks we spent in Bangalore gave me an idea of how people work in the ‘real’ world. It gave an opportunity to learn from different people and their style of work. This was the year where I was able to make significant progress in my project.

Last year, Aura Auro had given me different platforms to explore more about myself ie, workshops such as Nainital, Stewardship and Vippasana(though I didn’t complete it). All of these helped me know about myself better. From being a participant to being a PC in the Stewardship workshop, the experience has been very different. As a PC I learnt that I need to be more rigorous in my practices. Providing a space for others to explore and learn at the same time gave me happiness.

As a teacher I am able to read the children better than last year. I used to get triggered a lot often but now I tend to listen to them openly. This made me address their problems better.

And as always contributing to the schools and to Auroville makes me feel that I am a part of this place and that I am giving something back to the society that brought me up right from my childhood.

To conclude, 2016 has been a year where both Aura Auro and I have progressed to the next stage. In cricketing terms, we began the innings with a four(people) and we finished it with a six!(people)

Regards
Bala

Reflections of 2016

From the of start of 2016 to the present (Jan 08 2017), Time has been short yet has taught me plenty. The person I was and the person I have become has a lot to say about the many things that I have done and experienced, for me the most important thing that I care about is the freedom and universal truth that I put together in doing things in my journey, one path that I took among many that I enjoyed doing was learning and teaching at the same time with the children and my colleagues. I have, and am working with the 6th and 7th std students of Udavi school. The 7th come to STEMLAND for their mathematics class, while the 6th are at the New Building campus of the school.

This time when participating and being part of the organization team for the SFNE made visible the unseen, the amount of work and energy, effort put together to bring out the workshop by all the members was inspiring and moment was amazing.

I am gifted to be part of a larger community and given a space to grow and enhance by competence being in the AAD’s team. I have come to know how import it is to give what I have and receive what is it that is out there.

Regards
Sundar

Asteroid game

I developed an Asteroid game from the python course . I did this game since two weeks .I had some difficulties while writing the codes. My team members helped me to over come errors in the program. Here’s a video on the game .I really enjoyed developing this.

-Prathap

Trigonometry Puzzle Game

I have been working on a project for the 9th graders. They had a small puzzle game where they were supposed to find trigonometric ratios and built the puzzle piece by piece by colouring it. Children liked it and as a team we decided to build it in scratch. I took up the responsibility and build a scratch program similar to the game they had in their text book. Here’s the program.

Children were excited and they started building the program themselves.

Determining (a + b + c)2

Ajay a 9th std student from Udavi school had chose to learn Algebraic identities as a goal for his weekly plan . He wanted to prove:

(a + b + c)2 = a2 + ab + ac + ba + b2 + bc + ca + cb + c2

(a + b + c)2 = a2 + b2 + c2 + 2ab + 2bc + 2ca

He had made this into a project and created a module for others to learn using color foam paper. The module consisted of different rectangles and squares with specific sides.

IMG_20161203_100003

Here the red square has sides of dimension ‘a’, likewise yellow with ‘b’ and blue with ‘c’,The rectangles are combination of ‘ab’, ‘bc’, ‘ca’. and when put together the whole shape is  corresponds to (a + b + c)2

After completing this project Ajay had presented it to the class, and many children where inspired and took to action in designing the same in Alice, and starting new projects in Algebra.

IMG_20161203_092359

– Naveen & Sundar

 

 

Taj Mahal Project with Isaiambalam Students

The children at Isaimbalam school had been given a task to construct  a model of the Taj Mahal. They had split into two groups of 4 (boys and girls mixed). The students started by gathering information on how, where, when, whom,.. the monument was constructed, while doing so the children had engaged themselves in surfing the internet and were happy with what they had gathered. Once information was available the first group had started to build a clay model, and second group got into paper mache.

IMG_3823 IMG_3858This project was designed by Prathap, he had based this model upon Education By Design. Where children actively engage themselves towards the project. In building so they have added their knowledge from various resources. The following pictures shows the Monument getting to life.
TIMG_3860 IMG_3857 IMG_3831 IMG_3825 IMG_3822 IMG_3819 IMG_3854 IMG_3850 IMG_3848Project took two weeks to complete and this is how it looks now.

photo 1 photo 2

Reg: Prathap

Python Learning

This week I had a good time with python. Yes, I have learnt few things which I feel worth to share here.
Counter:
It is an unordered collection where elements are stored as dictionary keys and their counts are stored as dictionary values. One can find out  the number of occurrence of the list items.
Example:#
>>>from collections import Counter
# list1 is a list/array which contains numbers
>>>list1 = [1,2,4,5,7,3,5,0,8,5,4,5,4,5,6,7,3,1,2,0,8,3,4,5,2,1,2,3,1,2]
# Counter will convert list1 into dictionary
>>>count = Counter(list1)
>>># most_common function will give the series of all the elements and its corresponding occurrences.
>>>count.most_common()
[(5, 6), (2, 5), (1, 4), (3, 4), (4, 4), (0, 2), (7, 2), (8, 2), (6, 1)]
>>># get the most common element by sending 1 to the function
>>>count.most_common(1)
[(5, 6)]
>>>count.most_common(1)[0] # get element & no. of occurrence as dict
(5, 6)
>>>most_common = count.most_common(1)[0][0] # Get the most common element
5

Strip() :
In the past I have used strip to strip out some letters from a string. Example
>>>AuraAuro.strip(A)
uraAuro
But I strip() is also used to remove all whitespace at the start and end, including spaces, tabs, newlines and carriage returns.
Rename:
I was looking for a module in python which used to rename all the specific type (eg. .docs, .txt, .py) files in a particular directory.
# Go to a directory get all the files of specific type ( lets say “.xls”)
# and rename it with ‘os.rename’
>>> import glob  # used to get all the dir / file from a specified path
>>>import os
>>>path = C:\\Users\\Vaidegi\\Desktop\\*.xls
>>>file_names_with_path = glob.glob(path+“*.xlsx) # to get all the excel files name
>>>for i in range(len(file_names_with_path )):
. . .          os.rename(file_names_with_path[i], student+i+.xls)

Stewardship Workshop for Deepanam Kids

We conducted a Stewardship workshop on 24/11/16 for the Deepanam school kids who have their Maths class in Stemland. We conduct this workshop for all the children we work with to have the same language for communication so that it would be easier for us to work with the kids. I also thought that it personally will help them to be more responsible towards their growth in their learning. So we conducted the Stewardship workshop to the kids and it was delivered by Sanjeev Ranganathan.

IMG_20161124_102530                                                                                   Deepanam_Steardship

We did the STAND(possibility/inner wisdom),fears and deep listening with them. For them to realize their STAND, the children were asked “The person whom they admire the most but, the person should not be personally known”. I saw some kids explore deeply inside them for them to realize Who they really are” and shared it to the group. Like before they also realized their socialized fears and shared it. Then we did the deep listening for the children where they did the exercises and shared how they felt. Even-though, Mahavir(Maths teacher – Deepanam School) who said he will be a spectator, joined the kids(with whom he works) and participated in the workshop. He also shared his stand and fears.

Mahavir_participating

Deepanam_Standfears

It was a different experience for me to work these kids. Some kids were really into the tools and were deeply discovering themselves. The kids were courageous to share their insights even-though they hesitated in the beginning. Some of the insights that came out were really inspiring for me. I like to see the kids using the tools and discover more about themselves and share it to the world.

Projects to demonstrate the Mathematical concepts

In the first term, I asked the children to build Mathematical projects based on their curriculum. That was the first time they were forced to think beyond their limits and not just solve them in their notebooks.

Most of the children made four projects (a project from each chapter) in Scratch. Amongst them, four students built entirely different projects. The thought process was entirely different and I will share that on my next blog. Almost all the projects were similar where interactive models were created. The reason behind that was all the children followed one of their friends who built a project on measurements but each had different styles.

From this I learned that the children actually needed some basic models to create projects. I created two projects for the children which inspired them. One of my projects was to demonstrate multiplication of Algebraic Expression and the other one was to plot graphs based on user’s input.

I am really happy to notice that the children started working and they are building projects using my code as a base.

 

 

Scratch Project 9th grade

This project is on ‘Set Theory’ where Ajay shows the different formations in sets. i.e, AUB, A∩B

Following is a project where Preethika draws a van using the co ordinate system.

Below is a project on Set Theory where Yuvraj shows us different sets visually.

Following is a project on Co-ordinate systems where Kabilan showcases the different quadrants.

Two Transistor Oscillator

We built a two transistor oscillator which turns transistors ON and OFF all the time. The speed in which it happens depends upon the value of the capacitor. The higher it is the slower is the process of turning ON and OFF.

Transistor Q2 turns on first as there is now a pathway to ground for C1, C1 begins to charge with its right plate being positive and its left plate being negative through R1.

C1’s right plate reaches a threshold where Q1 is turned on. Turning on Q1 gives a pathway to ground to C2, causing C2 to charge through R2 with a positive voltage on its left plate and a negative voltage on its left.
sch_osc

Simulation of the two transistor oscillator in LT spice.

Output:

op_osc

The green wave represents output of Q2 TRANSISTOR at node1 with reference to ground. The red wave represents output of Q1 TRANSISTOR at node2 with reference to ground.