‘The best thing a child can do with a toy is to break it’
Arvind Gupta, science educator and inventor, at a recent lecture titled Making Things, Doing Science at the Archives at NCBS in Bengaluru, spoke about the joys of activity-based science education
Arvind Gupta rummages through a large plastic box, offering one delightful innovation after another, all made of commonplace objects, to an enthralled audience. A simple straw experiment offers insights into how the pitch of sound is affected by the size of the object producing it, pins and wires are fashioned into a motor, a balloon is used to make a pump, while a glass of water is transformed into a fun fountain with the addition of a straw.
“You can only buy stupid toys. Clever toys are made with hands,” Gupta, science educator and inventor, says with a laugh at a recent lecture titled Making Things, Doing Science that he gave at the Archives at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS).
Experiment in science education
At the talk, Gupta, who did a B. Tech from IIT, Kanpur, reveals an incident which inspired him to get into science education. He was in the second year of college, “very much a backbencher” when he heard a talk by the educationist and activist Dr. Anil Sadgopal, who played an instrumental role in setting up the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme (HSTP), an initiative aimed at improving science learning in multiple schools located in this district in Madhya Pradesh. “Many people say that they have covered so much area, so many schools etc,” he recalls.
However, Sadgopal, who had been working in Hoshangabad for around five years by then, said this, according to Gupta,
“From a city, we have a very romantic image of a village. But once you go to a village, you encounter class, caste, gender. It is very very difficult.” The talk by Sadgopal helped Gupta find his calling. “That became a sort of intellectual pursuit. A person with such sterling qualities, qualifications tried his best and was still not able to. I mulled over it for years.”
Sadgopal, a molecular biologist with a PhD from California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, had moved back to India after his PhD in 1968 and joined the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai soon after.
Here, in response to “the horrendous way science is taught in schools”, Sadgopal along with his colleague Dr. Yash Pal, the wellknown scientist and educationist, started working with municipal schools in Bombay (now Mumbai), trying out small, simple sets of experiments with the children here.
“They could see smiles on the faces of the children; their eyes lit up with the experiments,” says Gupta, adding that this reaction greatly inspired Sadgopal who went on to quit TIFR and start the NGO Kishore Bharti, which, in turn, set up the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme in the early 1970s. “It was the only experiment (in science education among underprivileged children) in the country postindependence, where an NGO worked for almost 25 years with over 12,000 schools.”
From engineer to educationist
In 1978, Gupta, then 25, who had graduated and was working in Tata Motors, went to the local bazaar. “I decided to buy one specimen of everything suitable in sight and try to see what the possibilities are,” he remembers. He was getting his bicycle tyres inflated when he noticed that the cycle valve was merely 10 paise per foot. He wondered whether pairing this cycle tube with matchsticks could make an educational toy. “Schoolgoing kids could easily grasp a model like this,” he says. His idea worked.
“For the first time, I felt I had done something worthwhile in my life,” chortles Gupta, who is the author of 24 books on science activities. He has also translated over 1,000 books into Hindi, presented 125 films on science activities on Doordarshan and created numerous innovative toys that foster learning.
“This kind of hooked me to science. I said that this is much better than making trucks.”
There was no looking back from there. He took a year off from his job and spent the next six months with the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme, followed by another four months living and working with the BritishIndian architect Laurie Baker, a pioneer in creating sustainable, costeffective architectural solutions. “I was not a Marxist. I was not a Leftist. But I thought that the only person who had touched the lives of the poor was Laurie Baker,” he says, recalling how he simply hopped onto a train to Trivandrum (now Thiruvanthapuram) and showed up at the place where Baker was living. “The one thing that I learnt from Laurie Baker is that we (Indians) take ourselves too seriously,” he says with a laugh, having clearly incorporated this learning into his own life. “Laurie Baker would make you laugh while doing dead serious work.”
In a 2012, film, one the many that can of be found on his website, arvindguptatoys.com, Gupta talks about an experiment ‘How many things in a matchbox?”, which—as the name suggests—involves packing an ordinary matchbox with anything that could be fit into it. “This is a great experiment for children because it enables them to look at little things around them,” he says in the video. “It takes no money, but it tells children to closely observe the environment.”
Science for fun
According to Gupta, the experiment, which was first conducted at the Vikram Sarabhai Community Science Centre some four or five decades ago, essentially involved every child being given a similarsized matchbox, which they would be asked to fill up. “In a week’s time, the child who came back with the maximum number of specimens in the matchbox would get a prize,” he says, listing out some of the objects which found their way into that matchbox: stationery, food items like flattened rice, mustard or cumin seeds and lentils, a strand of hair, a piece of twine and so on. “All the children gathered after a week and were asked to stand and shake their matchbox,” he says, adding that if it made a sound, the child was out without inspection since it indicated that there was a cavity inside. “One child was able to pack 150 things into a matchbox,” recalls Gupta, who was awarded the Padma Shree in 2018.
A critical take
In many ways, this is essentially what science should be about, in his opinion: the ability to look critically at phenomena close to you. It is something he personally practices, using everyday objects, which are affordable, accessible and effective, to teach science. Take, for instance, the numerous motors listed on his website that are made from things as prosaic as safety pins, sewing machine bobbins, copper wire, small batteries, light bulbs, magnets and cycle spokes.
“Don’t start by bombarding children with theories and definitions,” he says, pointing out that instead of directly teaching them about Faraday’s law of induction, start with activities, such as making a motor, which will help them understand abstract concepts more easily. “If a child makes a motor, the laws of induction fall in place,” he says, admitting that though he had studied engineering for five years, he discovered the beauty of the motor only much later “The horrendous way science and math are taught in school gives children a lifetime distaste (for the subjects), “he says.
And yet, “whether they go to school or not, whether they learn science, children like to play.” This was the rationale behind all the toys created in the Children’s Science Center at The InterUniversity Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) in Pune. He also talks about the free workshops he and his team conducted there biweekly over the 11odd years he spent at the institute.
“Fifty kids would spend around three hours there, where they would make 12 things with their hands and take them back,” he says, recalling how those children would wait till the end of the session to eat their snacks or even use the toilet, so enthralled were they by this process. “It was magic,” he says, comparing this learning process to regular classes in a school.
A good toy
Gupta, who rarely stays still, punctuates his anecdotepeppered lecture with pithy observations and nuggets of knowledge, which range from the futility of ethnonationalism and identitybased politics to the cultural underpinnings of origami the influence of the Second World War on science education and how colonisation continues to shape our world view.
He remains steadfast in his belief that good science can be taught with the help of good toys. And according to him, a good toy is one that children can open up, see what the innards are and put it back together. He also refers to a slogan, “a very anarchist one”, that is prominently displayed on his website:. “The best thing a child can do with a toy is to break it.”
According to Gupta, science is the ability to look critically at phenomena close to you