Feb 27th Tutoring session: Demonstrations Evoke Interest

Attendees: Vikram, Sairam, Sonu, Ravi, Shilpa


This blog is in particular meant for our tutoring group. Tutoring group, I am thinking of maintaining blog pages for all the tutoring sessions. This can serve as a medium to communicate by leaving comments etc. Please feel free to add your comments to this. It served two ways by logging our experience for all tutoring sessions and secondly for communications between the group.


Today we all assembled at Q203 and 2:30pm to rehearse the following three experiments before going to the tutoring venue. We got a little late reaching there and met Ben, Jeff, Caroline there at 3:25pm. Today the number of students was less around 8 as many students had gone to a party arranged for one student who was scheduled to undergo a surgery in near future.

As discussed in earlier meeting (refer last week’s MoM) we demonstrated following experiments today.


1)Burning the paper by dipping it in mixture of ethanol and water. Thanks to Shilpa for helping us with Ethanol for the experiment.

2)Demonstrating the reaction of Sodium hydroxide + sugar with water and potassium permanganate. When reactants are mixed the mixture changes color from pink to blue, green, brown and finally yellow.

3)Effect of surface tension of water, Ravi Prasad demonstrated this experiment by putting about 30 coins in water and showing the curved miniscule resulting from surface tension

After arriving there we set up two tables in front and around 8 children were made to sit facing the table. It was like a demonstration being done before a very anxious audience.

Following method was used to do the demonstrations. The demonstrators talked about what they were about to show. Children were asked to think about the experiment and their reasons that could explain the experiment. This gave them an opportunity to argue their point of view and understand the logical explanation.

Vikram and Shilpa were careful enough to keep the demonstration-2 simple for the school children to understand. Ravi showed demo-3 and finally the experiment-1 was shown by Sonu and Sairam.



We missed many of our tutors today. Good luck to Tina for her Ph.D defense!

thanks,
-Sairam