‘The best thing a child can do with a toy is to break it’ Premium

Arvind Gupta rummages through a large plastic box, offering one delightful innovation after another, all made of commonplace objects, to an enthralled audience. A simple straw experiment offers insights into how the pitch of sound is affected by the size of the object producing it, pins and wires are fashioned into a motor, a balloon is used to make a pump, while a glass of water is transformed into a fun fountain with the addition of a straw.

Arvind Gupta rummages through a large plastic box, offering one delightful innovation after another, all made of commonplace objects, to an enthralled audience. A simple straw experiment offers insights into how the pitch of sound is affected by the size of the object producing it, pins and wires are fashioned into a motor, a balloon is used to make a pump, while a glass of water is transformed into a fun fountain with the addition of a straw.

“You can only buy stupid toys. Clever toys are made with hands,” Gupta, science educator and inventor, says with a laugh at a recent lecture titled Making Things, Doing Science that he gave at the Archives at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS).

At the talk, Gupta, who did a B. Tech from IIT, Kanpur, reveals an incident which inspired him to get into science education. He was in the second year of college, “very much a backbencher” when he heard a talk by the educationist and activist Dr. Anil Sadgopal, who played an instrumental role in setting up the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme (HSTP), an initiative aimed at improving science learning in multiple schools located in this district in Madhya Pradesh. “Many people say that they have covered so much area, so many schools etc,” he recalls.  

However, Sadgopal, who had been working in Hoshangabad for around five years by then, said this, according to Gupta, “From a city, we have a very romantic image of a village. But once you go to a village, you encounter class, caste, gender. It is very very difficult.” The talk by Sadgopal helped Gupta find his calling. “That became a sort of intellectual pursuit. A person with such sterling qualities, qualifications tried his best and was still not able to. I mulled over it for years.”

Sadgopal, a molecular biologist with a PhD from California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, had moved back to India after his PhD in 1968 and joined the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai soon after.

Here, in response to “the horrendous way science is taught in schools”, Sadgopal along with his colleague Dr. Yash Pal, the well-known scientist and educationist, started working with municipal schools in Bombay (now Mumbai), trying out small, simple sets of experiments with the children here.

“They could see smiles on the faces of the children; their eyes lit up with the experiments,” says Gupta, adding that this reaction greatly inspired Sadgopal who went on to quit TIFR and start the NGO Kishore Bharti, which, in turn, set up the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme in the early 1970s. “It was the only experiment (in science education among under-privileged children) in the country post-independence, where an NGO worked for almost 25 years with over 12,000 schools.”