Our first observation of the Brightbox was in a class conducted at Agastya. Students from a nearby school came to campus for an hour long lesson on light using Brightbox. A group of about thirty 14 year old girls with matching braids walked into the physics teaching lab at Agastya. We waited in anticipation at the back of the classroom while their teacher divided them into groups and demonstrated the Brightbox. As each exercise was handed out students worked intently. The students were so focused on finishing the exercise that they rarely spent time just exploring or playing with the Brightbox. Now we have observed three class sessions and noticed this as a fairly common thread. We were expecting much more discovery time and play with the Brightbox to help spark the children’s curiosity beyond the initial lesson.
However, we found a different experience when visiting a night school program called Operation Vacenta. The goal of Operation Vacenta is to provide village children a place to learn, do homework, and explore new subjects while their parents work in the evenings. While the Agastya classes took place on the clean, fresh campus, the night schools were typically one room or open-air classrooms in the hearts of local villages. The smells of food, nature, and other things were all around us, and the students were very different than those we met in class. These students ranged in age from four to sixteen, and did not have the educational experience of some of the students on campus. On our first visit to night school, students demonstrated the different activities they do there, performing songs, dances, and dramas. Of course, we had to reciprocate the act, and performed several of our own numbers, such as “itsy bitsy spider” and “head, shoulders, knees and toes.” We learned that the environment at night school was not as structured, especially because there were young adult volunteers rather than formal teachers. The leader of the local night schools, Madame Jayama, invited us to bring Brightbox to night schools the next day.
We started our lesson off by giving each group of students time to explore and play with the different lenses, prisms, and mirrors included in the Brightbox optics kit. Each group was given flexibility to take as much time as they wanted. This was very important in allowing each group to understand some of the principles of the lenses. By giving each group a mentor who could answer questions and encourage exploration, children were able to understand and explore more than in a strongly structured routine. After some time, each group started and finished a new exercise we developed. They seemed to have a lot of fun doing it including lots of giggles and creating their own puzzles. We thought it was really great that the teams did not seem to get bored, but instead kept playing once the lesson was done. We considered the night a success, as the curriculum we had worked, and left the kids interested and excited.
When we realized that we would be conducting our next lesson at the night school with the same group of students, we struggled to create new curriculum in the hours before. None of our demos were working and we went to the night school with a list of short exercises rather than a coherent lesson plan. We were prepared for the lesson to be chaotic, however halfway through the lesson we realized that our lack of preparation was the most serendipitous mistake we could have made.
Because we divided the groups by age, some of the groups worked at very different paces. The group of eighth graders had long since finished the first exercise by the time the youngest students successfully finished. After the oldest students solved the puzzle they began exploring other ways to play with the Brightbox, coming up with activities that were much more interesting and creative than what we could have thought of in a classroom at Olin. For example, the students working with Nick focused the elephant image to a point so that it could be passed through a slit, then diverged the point to project the elephant onto a sheet of paper. I guess they figured out how to pass a giraffe through a needle’s eye! Students at the other night school noticed that they could project the light onto the ceiling and soon created their own activities making the elephant images dance and compete with each other. Meanwhile, the younger students had the time and intrinsic motivation to continue working on the first exercise until they were fully satisfied with a solution. This is the kind of grit that the latest pedagogical theory has only just started to recognize the importance of.
While a lack of structured instruction allowed the students to become immersed in the experience, one night school volunteer made us realize the importance of some lecture. He walked over to a group of students who had just solved a difficult puzzle. Although they were giddy with their victory, the real transformational moment happened when their teacher explained why their solution worked using optics concepts. When he pulled in examples like movie projectors and rearview mirrors, the room was filled with “ohhh!”s The Brightbox set the stage for insights, but the teacher led them to the “aha” moment.
Having the opportunity to observe some of Agastya’s many use cases for Brightbox gave us insight into what kinds of environments do and do not suit Brightbox. We realized that the lack of structure in the night school allows for the kind of exploration that makes Brightbox fun. Based on what we learned, we plan to adjust the curriculum of the Brightbox to build in exploration time and an explanation at the end of the lesson even in the more traditional class setting.
