The National Council of Science Museums (NCSM) – an autonomous organisation under Ministry of Culture – has set out to make mathematics less intimidating and more fun by training teachers and museum professionals in computational thinking. The council hopes to create learning models and mathematics kits, which could be circulated to schools across the country.
The NCSM has collaborated with the Australian High Commission in conducting an eight-day workshop for teachers and science museum professionals at Visvesvaraya Technological Museum in the city. The workshop will draw to a close on Tuesday and was conducted as part of the ongoing Australia Fest – a six-month celebration of Australian culture across 20 cities in India.
Stuart Kohlhagen, Director-Science and Learning, Questacon, Australia, who organised the workshop, said the topic was chosen in order to inculcate critical thinking and problem solving skills among teachers and students. The idea took shape last year following Dr. Kohlhagen’s visit to India to conduct Science Circus, a multi-city travelling science workshop. “We zeroed in on this topic because maths and computational thinking is recognised as a foundational skill to industrial transformation. There was a gap in addressing those requirements,” he said.
In the workshop, participants dealt with geometry, colours, shapes, numbers and sequences. These topics are usually delivered in a didactic approach in several countries, which will not develop critical thinking. This approach exposes students to the fun side of mathematics, he said.
The path ahead
Samarendra Kumar, Director of NCSM, said the council was aiming at rolling out the programme by March next year in all its 25 centres across the country, by developing learning kits for the same.
As many as 38 teachers and museum professionals took part in the workshop.