These are experiences from a two-week workshop facilitated by Lavanya Sahi at Srishti, titled ‘Computational STEAM’. We were tasked with forming lesson plans for standard 8 students of the Parikrma Foundation (https://www.parikrmafoundation.org/) that would introduce Computational Thinking through Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu). We then spent a day at each of their 4 schools in Bengaluru, at Jayanagar, Nandhini Layout, Sahakara Nagar and Koramangala, testing our lesson plans and Scratch programs with a group of students, usually around 15 in number.

Considered topics

A note on the history book

On the first day I was pointing out questionable content in the Social Sciences book. I joked, I smirked, I laughed. A big part of my first day was spend going through content that I found ludicrous. I spent some time in the evening who has a habit of defending systems and posing arguments for the sake of it. And he asked me why I found teaching Sanatana Dharma to be preposterous. And its a fundamental idea in his head I found hard to counter.

As I do some research in retrospect, not all of the text book seems preposterous. However the language and tonality perpetrated through the book is indicative of a narrow perspective.

“We all would have heard this shloka…” Why does a history book have to defend the content? Why is it the responsibility of the book to generate “pride”?

What ended up happening: Everything depends on the coordinate system!

All our scratch programs were dependant on introducing the coordinate system, which we realised late was an acute impediment. Teaching that in the same day as we introduce our core lesson plan would be tough.