DIY at Aurinko
“Life doesn’t come with an instruction manual”, said Anoop Keni, co-founder of Aurinko Academy, a Progressive Learning Space at Kasavanahalli, Bangalore. We were standing inside their workshop and he was explaining to me how the children build models using very basic, often recycled material. No pre-packaged kits, no instructions, just start from first principles and think of what you can build with what you have.
This “first-principles” approach is the basis of all learning at Aurinko Academy. Founders Chetana and Anoop Keni had home-schooled their son because they felt that mainstream schooling was eroding his true self. That effort expanded to include other children and their parents, and slowly a community was born. Even today, Aurinko parents are active contributors in the learning environment.
Toys from Trash
My day began by observing a “Toys from Trash” workshop conducted by an Aurinko parent, Mr. Mujahidul, for third graders. He was assisted by Seema ma’am, the Arts and Crafts teacher.
The Arts and Crafts space is a big room, flooded with natural light, with low tables in the centre where the children work with their material. Shelves along the wall are stacked with used paper, cartons, wrappers, PET bottles. Other art material like acrylic paints, thermocol spheres are also available.
The third-graders came in and made a beeline for Mr. Mujahidul, eagerly asking what they would make today. Seema ma’am guided them to their tables and made them sit down. Every class begins with a brief prayer, starting with “Aum”, to help them channelize their energy and get ready to focus.
Mr. Mujahidul distributed used paper printouts to each child. He asked them to fold and cut it into narrow strips. Then he folded the lower part to form the stem of a spatula, cut the top in two and shaped them into two vanes. He dropped this from a height, and it twirled down gracefully — a paper helicopter!
“Wow!” “Show me!” the children cried. The teachers helped them make their own helicopters and the flight trials began. “It works!” That shriek of joy when something you have built with your own hands actually behaves as it is should! Some children had trouble with theirs and the teachers helped them refine their models.
The next toy was a monocopter. The children were given an oblong outline to trace onto paper, cut out with scissors, fold the bottom into pleats and weight one end using cardboard pieces. As they worked, the children chattered away. “We should not waste anything”, “nothing is useless”, are some of the phrases I heard.
Then the monocopters were launched into the air. This one was trickier — some spiralled to the ground, some just fell flat. The children’s reactions were wonderful to see. “Can I make this at home?”, one child asked. Another said that there is a leaf in nature that spins like this in the wind. Mr. Mujahidul asked him to bring it to school and show them.
Sounds around us
Over the next hour I observe Chetana taking a Science class for fifth-graders. The children come in noisily, negotiate who will sit where and cluster around low tables in the centre of the room. Chetana asks them to say three “Aums” so as to settle down.
She tells them that they have to guess the topic of discussion today, and hands out musical instruments to them — tambourines, drums, whistles. “Sounds around us, ma’am”, is the response from the children. Soon, there is such a cacophony that Chetana remarks that the topic seems to have morphed into “Sound pollution!” She collects the instruments from them and initiates a discussion.
“What causes the tambourine to make a sound?” One child says it is the metal discs clanging against each other. Another says it is because of metal clashing on the wooden frame. “Which is causing the main sound?” asks Chetana. They test it carefully and conclude that it is because of metal hitting on metal.
“So when I speak, what is causing the sound? There is nothing hitting here.” The children talk about vocal cords, about air rushing through the throat and making a sound.
“Which instrument uses air?” “A whistle!” They rattle the whistle and say that there is a ball inside and blowing air through the whistle causes that to vibrate. As the air rushes around this ball, it makes a sound.
As the children talk, Chetana writes on the board the words and phrases used by the children.
“How does the sound travel?” she asks. “There is air between us and it carries the sound.”
Chetana starts walking backward while speaking until she has left the classroom. She comes back and asks them at what point did they stop hearing her. Why?
The children talk about volume of sound, the range over which sound can travel. “With more distance, there is more air in between us.”
“Why is it that sometimes we cup our hands around our mouth to call someone?” she asks. One boy explains that when we speak the sound is going out in all directions. It is not aimed in a particular direction. By cupping our hands around our mouth, we focus it, the way a sniper aims at a target!
“So how does an echo work?” They answer that the sound bounces off the wall and so we can hear it again and again.
Finally, Chetana brings out a device that Anoop and she had made for today’s lesson. A plastic bottle with its bottom cut off is laid horizontally on a wooden plank. At the mouth of the bottle is a piece of a balloon, stuck to which is a small mirror. A laser pointer facing the balloon is also mounted on the plank.
Chetana aims this device at the wall and switches on the laser pointer. A small red dot appears on the wall. She asks each child to come and speak into the bottle. There are many variations — some yell, some whisper, some beepbox, some shriek! In each case, the red dot on the wall obligingly vibrates and makes a new pattern.
Chetana asks the children to analyse what happened. “The sound makes the air in the bottle vibrate and that makes the balloon and the mirror vibrate.”
“But what causes the light to move?”
“The laser is reflected by the mirror onto the wall so it also moves around.”
They start coming up with their own questions.
“Why is the laser facing the mirror?” “What happens if we put a mirror on the wall?” “Can we use something other than a balloon?” “What happens if I puncture the balloon?” Chetana asks them to try all these variations themselves.
Inter-personal skills
At lunchtime, Chetana and I are joined by two fifth grade girls. They are lively and curious and want to know who I am, what I do and what I think of Aurinko. They also quiz Chetana about her fluency with different languages and how she picked them up.
Then the talk veers to their class and what is going on amongst them. Chetana mentions that the boys and girls seem to be spending more time apart. They agree and say that they don’t know what to do about it, although they would like to be together more often. It was all fine until fourth grade, they say.
Chetana explains that this always happens in fifth grade. But boys and girls each have their own learning styles and should work together to learn from each other. It is up to the children to make that happen. She gives the example of the tenth-graders and how close they are now. The girls agree and resolve to try.
Freedom of movement
The layout at Aurinko is very open — classrooms have three walls and are open to the corridor and the quadrangle. Children have complete freedom of movement. When they are working, they are bent over their tables and discussing amongst themselves. One of them might wander off to another class to investigate what is happening there, and then come back to rejoin her group.
In the center of one quadrangle, a high school girl was perched on a rock, practising her lines for an upcoming play, with the theatre teacher observing and providing guidance.
Engagement levels are very high. I did not see a single bored face during my day here.
Our daily routine
After lunch, I observe an English lesson for first-graders taken by Suganya ma’am and Satya ma’am. The children are discussing the various activities they do throughout the day — in the morning, at school, at home, and at night.
The children come up in front of the class in groups of three to recount these activities — one says what the activity is, another enacts it and one child writes it on the board.
In the morning, they “get up, brush, bath, komb, brekfast, go to bus”. Sure, there are spelling errors, but the idea at this stage is to get them comfortable with writing. After they have covered the week days, they discuss what is different on Saturdays and Sundays.
Suganya ma’am asks each of them to think of something new that they want to start doing every day. One child says “read bigger books”, another says “play with my toys”.
She then distribute workbooks to the children and they settle down to do some writing. Each of them is asked to pick one thing that they do in each part of the day and write it as a complete sentence.
One little girl ‘M’ doesn’t want to write. She starts circling the classroom, until Satya ma’am coaxes her to write just one word for each activity instead of a complete sentence. She obliges.
The class ends with an activity. Suganya ma’am distributes slips of paper to the children. Each has a line written on it, that they have to read out with appropriate expressions.
“I lost my dog!“ (dismay)
“Oh, she is an evil witch!” (horror)
“What a beautiful day!” (delight)
She asks them what these sentences are called. “Explanations!” comes the answer :-) She corrects them and says they are “exclamations”.
I also observed parts of two Math classes during the day, both taken by Pooja ma’am.
Conversion of units
The first was with fifth-graders and the topic was conversions. The children were seated in groups of 4, and they started with how to convert money from Rupees to paise (multiply by 100) and vice versa (divide by 100).
She wrote the Rupee symbol ₹ on the board, and asked them if they remembered it. One boy mentioned the Euro symbol € for reference.
After a couple of sums, they moved onto units for length and weight (they were revising these). She asked which one is the biggest: 95 cm, 95 m, 95 km. They answered that it is 95 km.
She asked what is the weight of child ‘S’: 35 g, 35 mg (giggles from the class), 35 kg? They said it is most likely 35 kg. “Can I measure her in grams?” There was some debate about this but then they did the conversion.
She drew the units along a linear scale for comparison, and the multipliers required to convert from one to another.
Mensuration
The other Math class was for eighth-graders. They were working on Mensuration problems from their Math workbook. The problem under discussion was to compute the area of a rectangular park of dimensions 300m x 200m, through which run two intersecting paths (10m wide).
The children computed the total area of the park (rectangle), then added the areas of the two pathways. Pooja ma’am reminded them about the overlap in the centre, and after some discussion, the area of that square was deducted.
There was also a circular fountain in the park so they had to compute that using the formula π r² and deduct it to get the remaining area. Pooja ma’am reminded them to choose the value of π as 22/7 or 3.14 by looking at the other values given in the problem (the radius r was 7 m, so that it would conveniently cancel out).
The joy of building
At the end of the day, Anoop Keni showed me around the workshop. Anoop has spent his childhood taking things apart (and putting them back together again!) and his kindred soul here is Sangram. Over the next hour, the two of them showed me model after model that the children had made, and invited me to play with it, figure out how it works and what it is for.
It is an electro-mechanical wonderland! The workshop has shelves stacked with old, discarded wooden planks, metal frames, wires, a dismantled microwave, stereo, toy cars, a bicycle…Aurinko parents donate whatever they don’t need or has come to the end of its life in the outside world. Here, they are taken apart and given a new life in a child’s project. Nothing is wasted.
Racks of safety goggles and other equipment stand by the doorway. Sangram explains that when children start coming to the workshop, the first few days are spent in drilling them on safety protocols. Then they work on the design aspects of a model, getting them to think about its usage.
One girl has built a mechanical arm using wooden trusses, connected with strings to mimic our muscles. Anoop asks the children to take inspiration from nature, to look at how our bodies are constructed.
There are mechanical automata of a flying horse and rocking animals — whose motion is controlled by a camshaft that converts rotary motion into linear oscillatory motion. These are made out of old wedding invitation cards — the stiffness of the paper is just right for this purpose.
A pair of plastic bottles are joined together like an hour glass and one is filled with water. At first, I think it is some kind of a water clock. But then Sangram gives it a twirl — and suddenly there is a beautiful whirlpool!
The door of the workshop is made of salvaged planks. In the middle is a little window made of tinted, toughened glass that looks so, so familiar! After many minutes of staring at it I recognize it as the door of a microwave oven!
Chetana joins us and we talk about how the children respond to these challenges, their enjoyment at working on their personal projects. She also talks about obstacles. Middle school is when the children’s bodies are really ready for the real tasks in the workshop, but that is also the age when they start becoming immersed in the digital world and gaming. This shortens their attention span and then doing something as simple as polishing wood seems boring! These are challenges that they are trying to overcome with the help of Aurinko parents.
We live in a world where our attention is fragmented into a hundred pieces. Channeling our energy and attention inward and focusing on one task at a time is a good way of reclaiming control over ourselves. Approaching a problem from first principles allows us to look at it afresh, and enables genuine learning. That is what Aurinko Academy tries to do with each of its children.
