Purva Fairmont – Session 1

9 children spent the afternoon doing various experiments to deeply question and understand the concepts behind Archimedes’ (See the post on How to teach Archimedes’s Principle to a 10 year old/) and Pascal’s principles.

It’s amazing how curious and creative ALL children are – left to themselves. It’s inspiring to see how quickly they can grasp even complex concepts when presented as experiments and interactions – than as a monologue.

We also spent time discussing the general guidelines (present in the learning WIKI) – emphasizing the need to be safe, the opportunity to be creative and the power of design.

We ended the session talking about the hydraulic system and how the project needs to be built as a team. The complete details of the hydraulic system project are now on the WIKI.

By next week, the children are to do three things

1. Teach the two concepts they learned to someone else
2. Visit the project page and learn from the video links posted
3. Meet as a team and create an initial design (the teams and contact details are on the learning WIKI). The initial design can just be an illustration of the basic idea drawn on an A4 sheet)