Author: Sundranandhan

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Building a microscope by hacking a web cam

Some of the 8th and 7th graders decided to come to school on their first day of Pongal holiday. Each person of the team came up different modules to build. I had an unused web cam and decided to turn it into an microscope. Naveen and Agalya were interested and so the Hack began

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Agalya unscrewed the web cam and separated all the components.

The hack was to reverse the lens.

Once the lens was reversed the children where able to see different objects we had initially checked out the display to see the RGB components.

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Evening at iSmart class and sleep over at Udavi

The day before the inauguration of the iSmart class room we had a combined class with two school children the 6th and 7th from Isaiambalam and the 9th graders from Udavi school.

The evening started with a circle and introduction of each others names.

Then the 9th graders from Udavi school had given a list of things they were willing to do that evening from mindstroms to strategy games and scratch programming.

 

Hema sundar and Kabilan worked with the mindstroms sets and the older lego nxt blocks with the younger children.

 

 

Naveen playing bounce off with a Arham.

 

 

 

 

 

The tables were arranges so that every couple of minutes the children were asked to switch tables, so as to see all the materials that were being worked on.

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Routing Ethernet Cables

The 9th grader at Udavi volunteered to paint the new Ismart class room that is being built in the factory side of the Udavi school campus. Which joins along with the Aura Auro Design Lab.

The new space required LAN connectivity.

The LAN cables where already routed to junction boxes which had to be clipped and fixed to the 24 model switch box.

(The box varies from brand to brand, Legrand is easy and takes less time to clip to the individual sockets but is ~ Rs 150 per unit that is 3x larger than other brands) The one that was used required more fine work of screwing and unscrewing individual wires of the CAT 6 LAN cables.

 

Vignesh connecting a socket box
Velmurugan connecting a socket box

 

 

We used straight connection for crimping the rj 45 connectors to the switch box

 

 

 

 

 

Then finally we tested if the wires were connected properly with a testing probe.

 

(The device had eight LED’s that would be connected to both ends of the cables. One of the device was the master and the other was a slave. The master would send a signal for each of the eight wires present on the CAT 6 cable and the slave would light up LED’s accordingly)

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Multiplication with the 5th graders

We started the Vaughn cube Videos, after completing a few lessons the children took up specific multiplication tables and drew all the objects that they could remember. Multiplication become easier for Pranav who could link objects to sounds and then to numbers.

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Auro Orcharid – Gardening and Honey Bee’s

Naveen had planned a trip to Auro orchard with the isaiambalam school children. There were two groups. One were interested in the getting to know about the honey bees and the other on methods of bed techniques.

Uma Ramanan a member of the farm introduced us to Auro Orchard, the first farm designed to sustain Aurovilles people back in time.

The day started by looking at raised bed technique and types of vegetables that they have grown.

Children were able to seen how much the production had increased due to the raised beds. (On an avg a turmeric plan can only produce 300gm of product but here they were able to collect up to few Kg)

The Papayas they have are not hybrid varieties the seeds can be used to grow new saplings.

This flower has medicinal values (kills germs and is antibiotic in nature) and are loved by honey bees as they grow through out the year.

Then came the honey bees, Uma explained that the bees are farmers most important friend as they are the major pollinators, and they don’t use them to collect honey in the farm. but recently a bee hive had vacated the trunk as it had over grown its population and moved out. Hence they had to empty the wax.

 

Then the children had a group discussion on the the life cycle of bees.

And at last they were able to see the bee hives that were in the farm 🙂 .

 

The children had a wonderful time, and are eager for another visit to the farm.

 

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Math with the 4th graders at Isaiamabalam school

The children worked on the process of adding two numbers in order to make split at the total to 10 + the remainder. The children used to Abacus to visually see the two numbers and its remainder. Then they paired up with their colleague and started practicing.

 

 

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Unit conversion

Along with the 6th and 7th in Isaiambalam school, we wanted to estimate how far one Km would be. All the students made a guess and wrote down their check point on a route from their class.

The children wrote down how far their guess was compared to a Km, and took other nine checkpoints of other children, when they went back to class they decided to convert each checkpoint to meters, decameters, and hectometers.

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Garden EBD

-Sundar and Arun

The children in Isaiambalam, had started an EBD on garden. There were already two two sets of steps(for creating beds, in order to plant) built using cement and bricks on the front side. The left side looked a little incomplete, The task was to complete a step on the left side of the structure. To do this the children had to dig out the excess soil to lay the first set of bricks.

To create the trench children had wired and made a straight line before digging. Before laying the bricks the leveling had to be checked, this was done using a tube level( a tube filled with water)

Then the cement was mixed to sand in a ratio of 1:3 along with required amount of water.

Brick work started.

Once the side steps where complete the children used the fraction kits to tell stories of proper fractions. Which they had used to while mixing cement of sand. They needed 7 pans of sand and 2 and 1/3 pans of cements.

Once the structure was complete the students had come up with values for the project. That were Respect, equality, and perseverance, and helping.

Then they started to estimate the build of materials and their cost. It started by calculating the number of bricks for 1m and expanding to number of meters they used it for. With this they started to tell multiplication and division stories.