Learning while teaching

So I was walking in the class one day. Looking at how students are making progress in their work when I see this bright student, hunched down, trying to evade thinking about the work at hand and distract themselves and their group with other trivia. I stand beside them, pick up the knitting which is their constant companion and possibly a selected stress buster activity, discuss the piece with them, appreciate it, linger a little more and ask, “Is Mathematica behaving ?” They seem to de-stress a bit, the problem is with Mathematica not them. It is the software that is being dumb, not them.

I had asked this question because I had seen them previously put mathematical as the lowest point (way down below the white-board, somewhere near the ground) in the previous project. We look at the code together, they appear to have done everything right. The answer from Mathematica is {}, Instead of a list of two functions. I am fond of this student, they understand math well and love working with whacky symbols. In an earlier interaction they had come up with a nice visualization of a mathematical system. I also remember that they with a friend had invented a bunch of novel symbols with which they had programmed Mathematica in the previous project  (which was the major reason for Mathematica confusion and their pain). I try to rewrite some of the Greek symbols as alphanumeric and arrange brackets, run a simple test. The test gives correct result, the problem at hand still outputs {}. Then they remember  that they have seen two theta symbols behave differently, we replace one of the symbols and voila, the solution appears.

The group chimes together, Mathematica just tells you, you are wrong but not where you went wrong, that is so annoying. I tell them we should shoot a mail to Wolfram, and request them to update Mathematica so that it gives feedback.

This exchange is particularly interesting and amusing to me because during the previous project, the group leader had to make an impassioned appeal to the class to provide feedback on the course so that required course correction can be made.  Feedbacks are important, from the coding platform or from the class. They play a very useful role in course correction.

This particular group had been struggling before too. They had written an equation

$\hat{i} = \sin(\theta)$.

I asked them how can a vector be equal to a number ? so they corrected it to

$\hat{i} = sin(\theta) \hat{\phi}$,

I again point out that magnitudes of both sides do not equal, so they write the correct standard formula for rotation of basis but say they are not sure how to verify it, I show them two ways of doing it “either put various angle values to check that the equality makes sense, or use geometry”. They seem to be satisfied with it and start working in the right direction.

Story of Nachiketa

One of the best part of childhood was to listen to mythological stories. One of my favorite stories was that of Nachiketa, the curious child. I shall narrate it here as I remember it, I believe there are many different versions of this story and mine is by no means authentic.

Many years ago there was a small boy named Nachiketa. He was very curious and wanted to understand a lot and loved to ask questions. His questions usually happened to be deeply philosophical. One thing he really wanted to find out, was what is the nature of the soul. Someone told him that the only person who can explain what soul is, is the god of death “Yama” himself.

So little Nachiketa decided to visit Yama and find out. He prayed and prayed (or may be traveled through a difficult path :)) till Yama was appeased and granted him a wish. Nachiketa asked the question that had been bothering him, “please explain to me, what is the soul?”. Yama tried to divert the boy to other things but Nachiketa was decided, he wanted his particular question to be answered. Finally Yama said that he is not allowed to explain to Nachiketa what is a soul, but what he can do instead is to tell him what soul isn’t.

Thus Yama started enlisting the number of things that a soul isn’t, “It is not body, it is not thoughts, it is not heart,…” etc. etc.. Then the story teller would tell me that the list is still not over. Yama keeps on going, saying Neti Neti (Na-ti which in sanskrit means, not this).

I like this story especially as it impressively demonstrates the futility of definition by negation in an un-bounded universe.

The Expo Day

It was a nice sunny Sunday yesterday when I took a walk in the Expo at the Ahmedabad University and had a great time talking to various student teams.

The CPU for the Carbon Cafe

The carbon cafe measured the carbon footprints of various habits like food and travel. The cafe was very busy but I got a chance to say hi to the students doing the cafe calculations.

Extreme weather all over the globe.

A team had mapped extreme weather events all over the globe. The volunteer was very enthusiastic and quite knowledgeable.

I took dozens of photos and videos but even after two hours I had visited only about half of the teams. A morning very well spent. Good work ISP team.

Tech Enabled Education

Tech enabled education

When some of the online tools and resources are used in the classroom, the student experience becomes quite rich. Following are screenshots from some of my courses

I made my lectures available on moodle which is a course management software, and made them available on the internet to everyone, not just my class. There was a discussion forum for students to interact and ask questions and all course related material, including attendance and grading was available from anywhere.

It was possible to give quizzes which were flexible in the sense that students got randomly selected questions from a question bank and could answer the quiz on their mobile phones. The quizzes got corrected instantly and could be accessed by students from anywhere.

Interesting open source resources made the courses interesting. I used quite a bit of media from wikipedia. The rewards kept coming in interesting ways. My favorite is that…

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Designs in Action

Affordable designs in action

We had been debating pros and cons of getting students work away from home.

• It makes them connect and work with new environments and cultures, against it increases the responsibility of faculty members for students wellbeing.
• It makes them independent versus how do we enforce discipline?

So when the opportunity presented to accompany the Olin colleges ADE (Affordable Design and Entrepreneurship)  team at their “cycle-rickshaw project” site we happily grabbed it. Prafullbhai, the then VC of the Ahmedabad University was very upbeat about learning from the experts and gave us all necessary support.  I am glad we did, because the experience was amazing.

One cold winter morning, I found myself waiting at the airport for one of the team members, the chirpy and irrepressible Radhika, after I picked her up, chatting about books from Rand to Tolstoy, we draw down to one of the tiny streets of the…

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The world in my classroom

here comes the World

One of the most satisfying pedagogy experiments I did was in the monsoon semester of 2017-18 at the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the Ahmedabad University.  I am especially surprised by the success of the experiment because it seemed to occur effortlessly and due to spontaneity, demanded by lack of time for planning.  My pedagogy came about as a culmination of multiple factors, following were the major ingredients,

• I had just come back after spending a semester at the Olin college, where I was involved in a flurry of insightful activities around student centric learning. My major takeaways from that semester were as follows:
• Design the interaction keeping student background and aspirations in mind, get to know their culture, their fears and their dreams
• Make students co-creators of your course
• Give students freedom to express themselves and encourage them in the process
• Encourage peer to peer interactions
• Experiment

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Animated Mathematics

Another one from the same place. I shall try putting in more pictures, my uncorrected papers are screaming at me right now. 🙂

As an experiment in pedagogy in the winter semester of 2016-17, I offered a course on discrete mathematics as a project based course. Students worked as teams in the lab on three projects, while there were some quizzes and a few lectures too. There were 66 students in the class. I offered three types of projects. Groups were formed randomly and were required to come up with their own project idea. Here is a sample of one of the game projects

//scratch.mit.edu/projects/embed/268372547/?autostart=false

This project was created by a my students Chaitya Sanghavi, Freya Shah, Nikhil Balwani, Purvang Shah

• Create a game traditional or your own, using the MIT software scratch and analyze it.
• Study an application of a finite state machine (FSM) and write a code to implement it.
• Create a code that implements a graph-theory algorithm.

Project:1  Games

I got the students, most of whom had no programming experience, to learn scratch…

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