The Junior Track is open to students who are moving to Grades 6 and 7 in 2024-25, with the caveat that those students who have already experienced the Junior track in previous years, and are moving to Grade 7 in 2024-25, could opt for the Senior Track.
This program has been designed to help tweens use both Analysis and Synthesis to engage with the world around them.
Analysis involves careful observation, hypothesizing, modelling & experimenting, simplifying, iterating and testing. Along this path, Math, while being an analytical tool that reveals hidden workings of the universe, is also a delight in its stand-alone glory.
To synthesise is to play “God” - to take disparate elements and to mesh them together in different ways; to innovate, first wading through the familiar and structured, and boldly moving onto the unchartered zones. To understand the limitations and possibilities that different elements offer and intelligently leverage them to create things of beautiful form and/or function is an incredibly fulfilling learning journey!
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This track comprises the 2 modules below; all students go through both modules, each lasting a week;
The Joy of Creating Things
(Junior Track - Students in Grades 6,7 in 2024-25)
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“Creativity is just connecting things.” - Steve Jobs
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This hands-on module comprises 2 activities.
2D Stop-Motion
Stop motion animation is a type of animation that is filmed one frame at a time. The actual characters/props are shifted between frames. To create a sense of movement, the sequence of pictures is played in rapid succession, it creates a sense of movement.
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Creating a short stop motion animation using paper cutouts for characters and backgrounds. Students are taken through a simplified process of making a short film. They will create their own short stories or jokes or anecdotes, design the assets needed and shoot using their phones.
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Rube Goldberg Machine
As Wikipedia puts it, a Rube Goldberg machine, named after American cartoonist Rube Goldberg, is a chain reaction–type machine or contraption intentionally designed to perform a simple task in an indirect and (impractically) overly complicated way.
Usually, these machines consist of a series of simple unrelated devices; the action of each triggers the initiation of the next, eventually resulting in achieving a stated goal.
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While watching these is a minute’s delight, designing and creating them is a labour of learning and love. Students will explore the properties of materials, geometries and symmetries and combine them with gravity and principles of Simple machines to design and create their own Rube Goldberg machine to perform a simple task such as moving a ball from one location to another.
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This course is facilitated by Muralidhar K.
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This module is part of the larger 2-week program to be held from May 15-29, 2024. All Junior students will have to go through both modules, including this.
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
(Junior Track - Students in Grades 6,7 in 2024-25)
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How do you design a controlled experiment to test a hypothesis? How do you make a reasonable estimate of the result you expect? How do you devise methods to measure the parameters you use? How do you interpret unexpected results? How do you present your data and compare it with similar experiments done by your peers? How do you anticipate and account for possible errors?
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These are questions that practising scientists must ask and answer in the course of their research in diverse fields – ranging from studying ant behavior to discovering pulsars. In this course, students will get a flavour of this scientific process through working on simple experiments related to light and sound. These are forms of energy that are very familiar to us and can be directly perceived by our senses. It will also underscore the fact that there is fascinating science to be revealed even in the most mundane and familiar situations. These explorations will hopefully lead to the children experiencing “the pleasure of finding things out” as Richard Feynman puts it.
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The course will combine striking demonstrations and hands-on explorations where students must think through the above questions, working in groups with fellow students, sharing and constructively criticizing ideas.
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In this process, we will of course encounter mathematics as the language of science, but we will also learn to look at mathematics as an intellectual challenge in its pure, abstract form and find joy in it.
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This course is facilitated by Sukanya Sinha.
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This module is part of the larger 2-week program to be held from May 15-29, 2024. All Junior students will have to go through both modules, including this.