Disha, AID and Endeavour

From the egroups...

The last week ended up being a science week of sorts at V.

With some simple and quick experiments downloaded from the net and the materials needed to do it reaching the kids on Wednesday night, V started gearing up for Disha 2006 pretty late. The experiments were very simple ones demonstrating persistence of vision and newton's third law using rotational motion. Thursday, the experiments and the fundas associated were explained to the kids, Friday some lingering doubts were cleared. When our reporters left the camp on Friday, the charts were getting prepared and the execution plan was being given final touches.

Saturday morning: The two project teams, Rajini and Jhansi, Jyothi and Padmini, landed up at Teresa's early enough. After registration and all, settled at their tables, they were soon assailed by the judge and a retired IIT professor who currently works with Agastya science foundation. Though I suspect the kids didn't exactly answer all the questions very well, I think the questions and the explanations and a few demos that the experts gave made things lively and exciting for our kids. Afternoon, the remaning kids (high school and PU) came to Teresa to see the exhibition. They hardly spent much time at the exhibits. But the best of the day was undoubtedly Mangala's captivating talks and pictures, kids (and I too) were enraptured, I'm sure. (I'm personally floored by the woman!!! She IS awesome!!!) After the event too, they were all jumping around to talk to Mangala. Quite a few, of course, want to become scientists now. Mangala has agreed to come to V, hopefully next week, to share some more pics with the kids.

The price distribution too had some bit of excitement for our kids: Jyothi and Padmini won the best write up award. And that was quite exciting. Though, probably, we should actully thank the website guys for the write up, it must have been quite an impetus for them and the rest of the kids too, to see some from them winning a prize.

Sunday, we had the AID person, Balaji coming and demonstration air, water and pressure fundaes to the kids. Very surprising and pleasing was the animated response from the kids, all shouting out explanations for the observations and quite a few correct ones too. It was good to see the kids thinking in the right direction as far as the science fundaes were concerned.

Evening, I went back to V to formally convene the first meeting of V science club - we decided to call it "Endeavour" (There is a story behind that too, but I don't want to make my notoriously long emails, any more notorious... I mean, long). The club, alarmingly, has 26 or so members!!! I sincerely hope a considerable chunk would drop out soon, otherwise the sessions would not be effective or meaningful. Want to chart out a few rules (about keeping time and being disciplined, yet active and attending regularly etc.) for the club and stick it up somewhere in V. Endeavour will meet every Sunday 4pm to 4.30pm. The meetings are intended to be short and interesting (yeah, right!! who drives them!!) and with strictly half an hour for duration, it is best to keep some rules. They would do well to be a little disciplined for half an hour a week ;-))

That was how the week went at V, we could almost call it a science week. I'm happy. And I'm enamoured by Mangala.