It’s time to tinker and learn

Amit Deshwal

I had read somewhere that our ability to learn is as natural as our ability to breathe. We all love learning provided we are free to choose what we wish to learn, provided we are allowed to spend time on learning things that engage our curiosity. The present schooling system, where children do not actively participate in deciding what and how they wish to learn but are mere passive consumers of the knowledge created for them by someone else, I believe, systematically destroys their curiosity and deadens the joy of learning. They do learn a few things as they make it through the system but end up losing interest in learning itself.

The three years I spent working at Centre for Learning, a space that allows children to participate actively, helped me deepen my understanding on some of these issues. I saw how children across all ages love learning; how they would push themselves to excel in things they have chosen for themselves; and how we need to carefully work with them in building an engaging environment that keeps alive their innate curiosity.

For the last two years, we had adopted a different way of engaging with the younger group. Instead of classes on subjects, particularly for science and social studies, we took up topics of their interest and worked holistically on those topics. We called these classes ‘Theme Classes’. Some theme classes would run for over a month while others would last only a week or two. The topics came from different directions, some suggested by the teacher, a lot from the students themselves. Given below are some of the topics that were discussed during these classes –

1. Study of volcanoes and earthquakes
2. Exploring fashion
3. How early man lived in forests
4. Study of the world around us – shape of the earth, stars, exploring the sky and space
5. Wildlife on our planet – watched Planet Earth series and had discussion around the same
6. Understanding physics through contraptions

In this article, I would like to talk about one such theme class we had with both the younger (7-10 year olds) and older (11-14 year olds) groups, a class that gave them space and time to explore and discover certain concepts for themselves.

During most of the last two years we had collected a lot of small items, such as wheels of different shapes and sizes, wooden blocks, old Jenga pieces, ropes of different strength and elasticity, pipes of different lengths and flexibilities. A lot of these were brought by children from their homes and places around. Sometime in the beginning of the year we were also gifted a set of pulleys, again of different sizes. During one of the classes, a student asked if we could spend the next few theme classes playing with all these items and making something out of them.

I was planning to work on some physics concepts with them and wondered what would be a better way to study some of these concepts than to let the children explore them through their own little experiments. The next day, I came back to the centre with a few videos on contraptions. A contraption could be understood as a strange, overly complicated machine, used to do something simple. A machine that would do something that otherwise could be done in one or two steps, in more than 30 – 40 steps.

Children loved the videos and they decided to make a contraption of their own – a contraption that might start with lighting of a matchstick or dropping of a marble and go on for a few seconds or a minute to do something else, like water a plant or light a bulb and a fan.

A month or more was spent in exploring and playing with the various items. During this one and a half month they –

1. played around with pulleys, stuck them to tables, used various ropes around them to learn how they really work. They also combined a few pulleys to see the effect that would have.
2. picked up a few planks and used them as inclined planes, testing out different angles and surfaces.
3. put together a few wheels and sticks to make see-saws which would be used to hit the Jengas.
4. used a series of Jengas and wooden blocks of different shapes to achieve the domino effect.
5. learnt to carry on the domino effect across different heights using two Jenga pieces tied together with a string.
6. learnt how to control the flow of water which they would want to pour from a particular height into a pipe or a cup without any spill over.
7. experimented with balloons and candles.
8. And lastly learnt to piece everything together in a perfect manner so that every step from the beginning to end works out properly.

The older students worked on a 40-second long contraption. The contraption is initiated by the lighting of a match stick which burns a stretched piece of thread. As the thread that goes around a pulley burns, it causes the heavier side to drop down. The heavier side goes down and hits the see saw, which in turn hits a wooden piece resulting in a multilevel domino effect interceded by see saw effects. The domino effect goes on for some time across three vertical levels created using tables. Finally, the last domino hits a pen cap with a certain chemical in it. The chemical pours into a cup with another chemical stored below creating fire. The fire burns another piece of thread leading to the completion of an electrical circuit, switching a fan and a light on.

The younger students worked on a shorter contraption, which started with a small domino effect, hitting a marble that would start a
multilevel pulley system, one affecting the other and finally pushing another marble piece on to an inclined plane. The marble goes down the inclined plane in a disciplined manner (because of the constructed pathway) and hit another domino. This starts another multilevel domino effect interceded by the see-saw effect finally leading to the watering of a potted plant. In another contraption, dominoes topple paint bottles on to a chart paper producing various designs.

Most parts of these contraptions were made by the children without any adult supervision and intervention. They took time to tinker with things and learnt the nature of different types of objects. After a month or two of working on these contraptions, the children were better able to relate to some of the concepts we studied later. They could relate to concepts of simple machines and how they are used to simplify some of the works that we do in daily life. They learnt on their own not only the working of a pulley but how to use multiple pulleys together to get the desired effect they were looking for. Another thing the younger children learnt was how to control the movement of the round marble down the inclined plane using walls built out of cardboards and wooden pieces.

Apart from simple machines they were also able to relate better to the concepts of force and about different kind of forces – gravitational force, frictional force. During the discussions a lot of answers emerged from their own experiences – experiences not just limited to contraption classes but the ones they have been having since they were kids.

These and many such instances while engaging with kids showed me the value of giving children time and space to discover their own interests and letting them explore those. It also showed me how discovering some concepts on our own is so much different from just learning about them from textbooks.

Recently, I was reading this article by Marc Chehab. It asked, what will happen if a child realizes for himself/herself that ‘What we see arrives faster than what we hear.’ For someone to arrive at this conclusion autonomously is utterly profound. It’s also radically corrosive to power. It’s profound because it may lead to some very deep reflections on their place in the world; and it’s corrosive to power because it teaches them that whether something is or isn’t true does not depend on what a teacher or a book says. It depends solely on whether it’s actually true – on whether what you see does in fact arrive faster than what you hear.

The author currently spends time working with a group of children in Hyderabad. You could read more about his learnings and thoughts at earthisnotround.wordpress.com.