Bodhgaya - town for Buddhist enlightenment

I haven't made time until now to sort through some pictures and video from my visit to Bodhgaya, India. This is the town where the first Buddha (Prince Siddhartha) attained full enlightenment back in 623 B.C. There is a massive monument (54 meters high) and park setup, with tons of burial sites and shrines built by folks from all over the world, known collectively as the Mahabodhi Temple (maha = big, bodhi = tree which buddha sat under). Additionally there is a massive (25 meters high) seated Buddha statue worth visiting. Many sites in the town have been dedicated by the Dalai Lama.



The bodhi tree shown below is, in a manner of speaking, the same tree as the original that the Buddha meditated and reached enlightenment under. A sapling was cut from the original tree for safekeeping and taken to Sri Lanka. As chance would have it, an invading group cut the tree down, and later a portion of the tree was brought back and planted in the original spot.



Lots of Buddhists from all over the world have come to this town and set up monasteries for monks from their homeland to come and study. I was lucky enough to stay in two separate Tibetan monasteries. Others in town were from: Bhutan, China, Japan, Myanmar, Nepal, Sikkim, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tibet and Vietnam (Full list thanks to Wikipedia).


Some of the monasteries have extra large prayer wheels for those tough times when you've really gotta belt out literally millions of prayers in one day:



Without further ado, I give you the latest "Places Not To Fall Down" installment:



Also there were large collections of tea lamps / candles which are totally awesome, if not unbearably hot in the middle of the summer:

Here's a random (whiplash) panorama of the Gaya train station. This is a plain, small town train station, at 1:30am. There are thousands like this all over India:


And finally, just a picture to capture the vibrance of India, this one shows the various colors, and the intensity, of the powder used in religious celebrations and every day life, all available for a few rupees in every market.

Electricity + OLPC Lesson Plans (Grammar School Science)

This post is about the lesson plans that I created for the Electricity chapter of the class 6, 7, and 8 students back in Meerut, India. They include the basic concepts, some examples of classroom interaction and homework, as well as the low-cost science experiments (materials and explanations) that I produced. Additionally included are notes on the learning curve and student interaction with the OLPC laptops. As with the OLPC report, this one wasn't written with a clear audience, and in hindsight, should have been separated into a mostly-science report and a mostly-OLPC report. C'est la vie. Take it or leave it.

[Sample of Lesson Plan / Notes used for teaching: Wikipedia graphics and custom graphics.]

Click here to download the Lesson Plans / Notes that I created.
Click here for a Test (with answers) for all three classes.

[Sample of student's work, showing the path of electricity from the source to a light in the home.]

It should be noted that I've posted this content just for blog readers - mostly friends and family. As the folks over at Iridescent Inc have discovered, random lesson plans on the internet aren't too helpful for educators, there are plenty of bad ones out there to sift through (I'd like to think mine are good although I'm sure we all would). The times are changing, and now even lesson plans are out - replaced by simpler concept maps that teachers can build around.

If you are an educator, and looking to contribute or to find content, check out Iridescent's new approach: a wiki for science education analogies! It's in it's early stages, so get involved and throw some content in there!

OLPC Laptops in the Classroom - report

This post goes back to April when I was teaching science to the 6th, 7th, and 8th graders
at Chiragh Grammar School, in Meerut, India. I was experimenting with the role of the low cost, rugged, OLPC laptop computers in science classrooms.
So how did it go? Well I just so happened to write it all up! Although I wrote up this full report (20 pages) in early May, we weren't sure where the report should go. If you're interested in reading it all, find it over at Iridescent Inc -- the non-profit science education group I've been involved with the past few years in Los Angeles.

Click here to download the report.
Click here for Iridescent's Educator website.

Since I wasn't sure the audience that I was writing this for, nor where the report would show up, I didn't put a whole lot of effort into polishing it (grammatically or otherwise). That said, I put in our experiences and hope that others can benefit from what we learned!