Jugaad, educational toys from Junk (TPACK at work)

by | Monday, September 14, 2009

sextant

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…

Pi Day

Pi Day

3.14 looked in a mirror and guess what he saw? Happy Pi(e) day.

Limerick on Math & Beauty

Image credit: eoliene_pe_campii Mathematical Beauty: A limerick Punya Mishra, Jan 27, 2010 Doesn’t it just gladden your heart to see These games we can play with infinity? How can one stay aloof From the elegance of a proof And remain immune to mathematics’ subtle...

TPACK & Activity Types

Judi Harris, Matt Koehler and I just submitted an article on Activity Types and TPACK. We had presented this at AERA last year and it took a while getting it ready to submit as a journal article. In this paper we combine the work that Judi (and her colleagues) have...

Rainbows in your backyard, how scary

We have been talking about misconceptions in my summer MAET classes and one of my students sent me this hilarious link. There is really nothing much to say... just see it for yourself. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3qFdbUEq5s[/youtube] Another video that I...

Koehler, Mishra & Yahya 2007

Koehler, Mishra & Yahya (2007) is an important paper in the TPACK related work for a range of reasons. The research captured in this paper actually predates the TCRecord (Mishra & Koehler, 2006) article, but the vagaries of publishing and journal waiting-lists...

A certain ambiguity

Certain Ambiguity, book cover A Certain Ambiguity: A Mathematical Novel is a book written by two of my high school friends, Gaurav Suri and Hartosh Singh Bal.

The Three Oddest Words

A poem by Wislawa Szymborska Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it. When I pronounce the word Nothing, I make something no non-being...

The future will not be a multiple choice test

From Chris Sloan, teacher at Judge Memorial Catholic High School and a student in our hybrid PhD program, comes a link to a TED talk. The description is as follows: Creative genius Drew Davies and forward-thinking educator Jaime McGrath propose a new approach to...

Palindromic poetry: Falling Snow

A few weeks ago I had written about an email that I received from an eighth grader in Colorado. Jake, a budding poet, was interested in learning more about me in the context of some palindromic poetry I had written many years ago. I wrote back to Jake (you can see the...

2 Comments

  1. Susan

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

    Reply

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