The Agastya’s Campus Creativity Lab at Kuppam is designed to provide children with the best learning environment and equipment. It strives to truly invoke children’s curiosity and enable them to learn by themselves instead of hand-feeding information that students learn by rote for the sole purpose of school.
This series of articles aims to provide a glimpse of the different labs and spaces on the campus and how they aid the process of “Aah! Aha! Ha-Ha!” the Agastya Way of Learning. What does this stand for? The Aah indicates the curiosity one has about phenomena around them. The Aha is for when one conducts experiments and arrives at an explanation for their curiosity. The Ha-Ha stands for the joy and confidence gained during this learning process.
The Math Park at the Campus Creativity Lab is dedicated to Srinivasa Ramanujan, the brilliant mathematician of India. It is inspired by Ramji Raghavan’s (the co-founder of Agastya) visit to Ramanujan’s wife, who mourned that nobody remembered her husband’s genius and contributions to the field of mathematics. Hence, through the park, Agastya hopes to keep his memory alive.
The Ramanujan Math Park is an outdoor learning space filled with life-size models, games and other interactive activities. Art, Design and Math blend at the Ramanujan Math Park to make learning fun and immersive. The main objective of the Math Park is to promote greater engagement with mathematics and understand the fundamentals of math. We achieve this by using hands-on interactive approaches through exhibits that demonstrate connections between math and other fields.
We aim to provoke greater engagement not only among students and teachers but also among the parents and the community at large. The idea is to make learning a community practice and use it to increase dialogue and discussion amongst the whole society.
Students and teachers can look at it as cooperative learning, where they can discuss, use their hands and play while learning. The lab is designed this way to remove the fear barrier between the learners and the teachers in a conventional classroom. In a traditional classroom, teachers are often put in a place of authority, and the children are discouraged from engaging in dialogue with them or asking too many questions. Teachers fear they would not have time to discuss a topic in too much detail, lest they are unable to cover the whole syllabus.
Thus, in the lab, they can use demonstrative and hands-on models to explain subjects more clearly and engage in fruitful discussions with their pupils. The lab helps the students connect what they’ve learned in the classroom with real-life situations. The math park propagates the prototyping of creative math models to improve methods of teaching.
Hence, it is not about equations on the blackboard but about seeing math in nature and day-to-day life through interactive learning. In the words of Ramji Raghavan, “the Ramanujan Math Park uses tabletop models and life-size demonstrations that facilitate the Aah! Aha! Ha-Ha! Way of learning.”
Inside the indoor lab connected to the Ramanujan Math Park, the models combine math with music, physics, art, architecture, and many other fields. At the end of the day, children see that math is not about hypothetical numbers and problem-solving but that math is everywhere, in everything.
The Math Lab also houses imaginary exhibits on touch screens with geometric patterns, 3D models etc., that make a child curious about what’s happening, making them click on the I button to read more information. They invoke the curiosity that is the starting step of learning.
Srinivasa Ramanujan embodies the spirit of curiosity, creativity, inclusion and inspiration. These aspects helped create the genius from the obscure government school that the world today remembers. The Agastya Ramanujan Math Park hopes to invoke the spirit of Ramanujan in visitors who leave with a new perspective that involves all these aspects.
