School’s out! Teachers on a maths and science adventure
July 31, 2024 | Bharti Dharapuram
Participants and resource-people at the recent Vigyan Pratibha workshop at IMSc.
The Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc), Chennai hosted a five-day Vigyan Pratibha workshop for science and mathematics teachers between 10th to 14th July 2024. The 43 teachers attending the workshop represented central government schools (Kendriya Vidyala, Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya and Atomic Energy Central School) across Tamil Nadu and Kerala.
Vigyan Pratibha is a project by the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (HBCSE), Mumbai. The program develops learning resources and offers training to encourage talent in science and mathematics among 8th to 10th Standard students from diverse backgrounds. The project uses learning units to deeply engage students in discovering knowledge by observing, analyzing and discussing common phenomena around them. IMSc is the nodal centre of the project in southern India and regularly organizes workshops for teachers, and makes school visits to help them implement learning units in their classrooms.
In the recent workshop, resource people from various institutions converged at IMSc to introduce teachers to learning units and spoke about various themes in science, mathematics and pedagogy. “We pick learning units that work well and where we’ve got a good response from teachers. There are also ones that we are trying out with them for feedback,” says Varuni P who coordinated the event along with Manikandan (Mani) Sambasivam from the IMSc outreach team. Graduate students and faculty at IMSc also give talks at the workshop. “Some sessions are in the form of lesson plans that teachers can do with their students but some are also just interesting problems and topics for teachers to think about,” she says.
Mani and Varuni engaged teachers in a conversation around pedagogical content knowledge, which deals with understanding the different ways in which students think about and interpret information. D Uthra from DG Vaishnav College, Chennai mapped the different kinds of questions one can possibly ask and how these shape our observations and thinking.
There were sessions about finding patterns, critical thinking and making inferences. G Arunkumar from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras introduced mathematical thinking using patterns in square numbers to make conjectures, find proofs and arrive at generalizations. Viswanath Sankaran from IMSc spoke about the different ways of partitioning a number, the curious associations between them and the process of proposing theorems. A fantastical quest in Fermi questions to estimate intangible quantities using back of the envelope calculations was led by Jayasree Subramanian from IIT Palakkad.
There were many activities involving games and hands-on activities. V Sathish Kumar from IMSc introduced a card game called “set” where the goal is to quickly spot sets of cards based on rules about their patterns. While having good fun, teachers learnt about the mathematics behind the game play drawing from combinatorics and logic. Varuni encouraged teachers to explore ways of arranging square patches of different sizes to assemble a larger sized quilt, introducing the mathematical problem of tiling. V Madhurima from the Central University of Tamil Nadu, Thiruvarur used the fable of the thirsty crow to illustrate the measurement of volumes and packing. To demonstrate the properties of materials and their interactions, Mani encouraged participants to test different kinds of cleaning agents to bring back the shine to tarnished copper vessels.
AV Balasubramanian from the Centre for Indian Knowledge Systems, Chennai spoke about the ecological importance of sustainable agriculture and the immense regional diversity of grains in India. His talk ended with a lively discussion where teachers shared their personal experiences about food and farming.
“Sometimes it [the training] is directly applicable in our classroom but at other times these experiences lead us to finding new ways to teach,” says Parveen, school teacher from an Atomic Energy Central School. “It is an ignition for us to carry things forward,” adds Balbir Singh Narooka from a Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya. However, there can be challenges with limited availability of time in class and adapting teaching methods to changes in curriculum, feel a few teachers from Kerala.
“Once the teachers come in they tend to hold back, but relax after a day or so and feel free to discuss a lot of science and maths. This transformation is really nice to see and happens every time,” says Mani. “They are comfortable enough to say that something is not going to work,” Varuni adds. “Many of these teachers will come back for a second workshop in November where we will do a few more learning units and get their feedback once they’ve tried the material in class,” she says.
