School Science Fair

After a couple of weeks of  very hard work, the science exhibition at the school got done. The 5th class children had done some charts........leaves, flowers and fruits in and around their campus. The 6th and 7th had a little more ambitious projects. Of these, a few worked quite hard while some children expected me to do it all for them and thought they just had to stand there and talk a bit. Of the few good ones was this 5th class boy who did some work for ALL the projects. He helped build the clay mountain with hidden  funnel and tube for the hydel plant, he built the  volcano with a hidden bottle for the soda volcano, he made a car with a cardboard carton for a balloon driven car,  he helped me with the solar oven and with my first unsuccessful biogas plant. I was very impressed with this little boy. There were others who did well too. One project that I did not even have to touch was the "Braino"....made totally by a 6th class  boy.  I just had to explain how the connections were to be made. After a couple of false starts, he got it right.
There was this girl who had heard about chromatography  and insisted on doing it. I tried to discourage it since I did not feel I could explain to them the principle behind it well enough for a 6th class child to understand. Finally, I used a strip of paper kitchen towel and separated green ink using water as mobile phase. The girl who had made a model of a solar oven and the boy who had made a model hydel did an excellent job of explaining what  their model was about.
My saviours in this whole episode were two young women who were studying for their MPharm. They had a break while they were waiting for some company to organise their internship. They helped me with some of the work, specially in view of my miserably inadequate Telugu, they could translate  what I said to make the younger kids understand.

Dropping out of MOOCs

I am the kind of person who works very hard when compelled to - I need deadlines or some such pressure to work hard. But, if someone told me that there was this rewarding work that  I could do if I wished to, it would never get done.
So, when I registered for a couple of Coursera courses, I told myself that I must see these through and prove to myself that I can motivate myself without external pressures. Guess what- I haven't completed the courses. No surprise.
But it is almost everyone- not just me. There is a  90% dropout by one estimate.  
"Some users -- including stay-at-home parents or retirees -- may sign up for the same reason they do a Sunday crossword puzzle, said Yvonne Belanger, the head of assessment and planning for the Center for Instructional Technology at Duke University.

“They have nothing more than, ‘This is a good way to spend my free time – it’s better than television,' ” she said.

But I swear my reason for enrolling is not the same as that common to the retirees mentioned here.

I was really interested in the courses, but somehow day to day chores always go up on my list of priorities.

“Emerging data ... show that massive open online courses (MOOCs) have relatively few active users, that user ‘engagement’ falls off dramatically especially after the first 1-2 weeks of a course, and that few users persist to the course end,” a summary of the study reads.

Tykrograma

As I had mentioned before, I go to this school in a neighbouring village  where, at present, I am trying to set up a 'Science Exhibition" for the 5th, 6th and 7th class children. I was reading the Environmental Studies text for the 5th class. It is surprisingly  broad in its coverage and goes further than the cliches... it gives anecdotal write ups about a shepherd in Palamuru, a cotton farmer, a poultry farmer and their problems. Then, there is a chapter on nutrition  and food pyramid, on our body, forest and tribal life, transport, one on safety and first aid, one on child labour. Then it covers the atmosphere,  energy sources,some basic geography and a bit of history etc.......There are some good things about it, and some deficiencies. The good thing is, it sensitises urban children to lives they otherwise do not get to even see. The bad thing is that it  takes on too many things and does not do justice. I think I learnt considerably more geography than this.
One other thing is that the publishers and editors have no concern for language. It is in English meant for English medium schools. At the age of 10 or 11, if they read a book with grammatical errors, they are going to learn just that. Language skill needs to be nurtured right from the beginning. After learning to say "he tell to me" and "he enquired me" till the age of 15, the child cannot suddenly change.
Lastly, there is a page that says
"I am an earthworm. I make the soil fertile......."
"I am a snake. I help farmers by swallowing rats......"
and
"I am tykrograma. The scientists from I C A R created me. My life span is only one week. I destroy the eggs of enemy insects that infect crops..."
I have looked up Google search, and ICAR website. I cannot find out what tykrograma is. I am curious.

PS:  The NBAII lists biopesticides.............There I found  Trichogramma australicum , T Brasiliensis etc. which act against sugarcane borer. I am relieved, but what about the generations of children who are looking for the mysterious tykograma?

Outsourced!

 Why are Americans complaining  about their jobs being outsourced? Look at our police...THEY have outsourced their jobs and are quite happy to do so.  If someone is robbed at an ATM, the ATM people should deal with it...so if there is a mugging or murder outside your house, you are at fault....why did you not post a security guard outside your gate? That's why Tehelka has not filed a police complaint yet. They are still looking for the agency that rape investigations are outsourced to.

The Economist has an article on the dangers of an education system that focuses on competitive examinations.
Is education getting any less frenzied in India? Getting up at 3.30 am to go to an IIT coaching class from 4.30 am since when you are 15; writing 20 entrance tests...
Then there are these random aunties asking you why you are not in an IIT when both your parents went there (it happened to my son)
Are there perhaps a few smaller number of parents who put their children through this torture?

drinks chiller

I had once wondered if the Ranque Hilsch vortex could not be used to make cheaper air cooling systems. Here's a drink cooler using another/similar vortex. Awesome! just cool it when you need it and the fridge space can be freed!

Never look at the big picture.

Reading a blogpost on open access reminded me of how closed access is sometimes.
When my younger kid started nursery school, I thought that the 3 hours she was in school could be spent reading up on current research. So I went to a research institution in the city, and asked their librarian if I may just read in their library. He was very nice about it and even got me a temporary pass made. However, he soon got transferred out. The next person was downright scandalised that I was using the library.  He said that I must pay Rs2500/ per annum. That was a large sum in 1990  and I wasn't earning a single paisa. So I had to give it up.
His logic was that my reading /leafing through journals would make it necessary  for more frequent rebinding and costs would go up. He really said this!!
This institution is funded by public money. I am a member of the said public. No one is likely to browse through JCS Dalton or Spectrochimica Acta to pass the time of the day till the movie started, or some such thing....JACS is not Femina! In fact after a gap of 6 years, I had to struggle to get through a review article and usually took quite a few visits to complete reading one. So why would the librarian not encourage the few people who wished to read journals? It is the effect of being in a bureaucracy.  Never look at the big picture...only read the fine print.