Jugaad, educational toys from Junk (TPACK at work)

by | Monday, September 14, 2009

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I had written earlier about the idea of Jugaad, the quintessential Indian idea of situational creativity. One of the masters at this is Arvind Gupta. Check out his website for tons of wonderful science toys and experiments that can be made from stuff we typically throw away. Very cool and a critical part of the kind of repurposing of artifacts we need for creative teaching.

Throwaway Technology, playful Pedagogy and powerful Content… who says TPACK needs hi-tech!

Via Major Fun (aka Bernie DeKoven) comes Arvind Gupta, winner of the Defender of the Playful Award.

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Milap 2008

The Indian Cultural Society of greater Lansing (ICS) held its annual cultural program Milap 2008 this past Saturday. It was a great program with traditional and Bollywood dances, songs, and other performances. My daughter Shreya's dance troup, performed a Kathak dance...

The “O” in Obama

Steven Heller continues his series on political typography and branding with an interview with the design team that developed the now iconic symbol for the Obama campaign. Check out The "O" in Obama. Previous postings on this theme can be found here and here.

Creativity, Digitality, and Teacher PD

It has been almost 5 years since my research interests shifted formally to issues related to creativity, technology and teacher education. This line of work (though less influential than my TPACK related work) has led to multiple journal articles and research studies....

Wordle, McCain v.s. Obama

As I was playing with Wordle (see previous postings here and here) I realized that it could be used for political analysis. So here are John McCain and Barack Obama's acceptance speeches as a word-map. Can you without, my telling you so, figure out which is which? A...

Tiger by the tail

A while ago I blogged about a column by David Brooks in the NYTimes (Flipping the Tech & Ed equation). Brooks described research by Goldin and Katz indicating a "race between technology and education" based on the idea that technology is (by its very nature) skill...

EduPunk: The logo

I had written about the EduPunk program and my natural affinity to it here. What I forgot to add in that posting was an EduPunk logo I had created. This logo was made using photos of letterforms from Flickr. There is a handy-dandy tool created by Erik Kastner called...

Complicating the idea of Design Thinking (in Education)

Complicating the idea of Design Thinking (in Education)

“Design thinking” is one of the latest buzzwords in education. Proponents argue that design thinking is a tried and tested process for fostering innovation in education while critics suggest that it is the latest fad to sweep through, and will, like others before it,...

Good-Evil Ambigram in Pub Med!

Good-Evil Ambigram in Pub Med!

My Good-Evil oscillation ambigram design is easily one of my most popular designs - having made it to multiple publications, websites, covers of magazines, on the TV Show Brain Games... and now it has made its way into a medical research journal Frontiers of...

Yet another stop-motion movie

One Nikon D70, two bored kids, one snowy day... and 49 seconds of fun. Check out the latest stop-motion goofiness! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drc6Oo4b9C0 You could also see the 12 Days of Christmas, desi style (the original can be found here) as rendered by Shreya...

2 Comments

  1. Susan

    Whooah! That’s cool. How can you make toys out of junks?

    Reply

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