Math Gaming Club 2019

The Tinkering Lab at NCL Innovation Park has been arranging a “Math Gaming Club” workshop for a while now. I have been part of these workshops [in minor and major capacity] for the last couple of years. It’s always fun to interact with the kids, especially the younger ones. They never cease to amaze as well as amuse me. The existing school curriculum and pedagogy really fails to teach the beauty and essence of mathematics; in fact, it rather creates an intimidation about the subject. At “Math Club”, we endeavor to create those [otherwise missing] “Aha” moments in an intellectually and creatively stimulated environment. The interaction with the younger kids, their bubbling enthusiasm coupled with innocent naivete is refreshing for me with my otherwise brutally spartan routine [thanks to my two startups]. And this year was no exception, we just finished a ten-day long workshop last Friday. We usually expect kids from 10 to 18 years of age to attend the workshop but this year we had one 8-year-old girl who was quite excited about the workshop. And to our surprise she did extremely well in almost all the sessions. Perhaps we should allow more younger ones to participate from next year.     

I was carrying my DSLR on Tuesday as I wanted to take some photographs of bacterial samples among other things. I had a half-an-hour break in between so I took the opportunity to shoot a few candid moments while kids were intently listening to Manjushri ma’am during origami session. Here are few of the pics [Note: I was not covering the entire session or trying to frame everyone. If you want to check the official coverage, please check with Sayali at sayali@web.venturecenter.co.in].

You can navigate with arrow keys and click to check the larger version on flickr.

Math Gaming Club 2019

Few pics from Raspberry Pi workshop at IISER, Pune

A couple weeks back I conducted a Raspberry Pi workshop for the students of Pune Municipal Corporation [PMC] schools. The workshop was arranged at IISER by Exciting Science Group [ESG]. A total 24 students from three PMC schools [Hutatma Balveer Shrishkumar, K.C. Thackeray Vidyaniketan, Dr Vasantdada Patil Vidyaniketan] attended the workshop. 

During the workshop, students learned how to use command line interface, how to solve problems with Wolfram|Alpha- a computable search engine on Raspberry Pi. Once they become a little comfortable in using the device, they were introduced to Mathematica and Wolfram programming language that are freely available on Raspberry Pi. Students successfully learned to calculate even, odd, and prime numbers using Mathematica.

Later on they wrote programs for simple conversions like Fahrenheit to Celsius, and more advanced like finding Palindrome numbers and Perfect Numbers. They also learned about GPIO and to connect LEDs to different pins on Raspberry Pi. Here are the few pics from the workshop-