Arvind Gupta dips his hand into a box and pulls out matchsticks and pieces of thin rubber tubing used for bicycle valves. After a little snipping and scraping, he pushes the tubes onto the ends of the sticks. Two random objects become one flexible shape—a square, hexagon or triangle — that brings geometry to life. Then he moves on to biology. Gupta takes an old soccer ball, a couple of glass lenses and some plastic pipes and suddenly, right there in front of you, is a working model of the human eye.
Gupta has many such toys in his repertoire, each one illustrating concepts from physics, chemistry, biology and math. They are made with cheap, easy-to-find materials so that anyone, including poor children in India and across the world, can learn science through fun, hands-on methods. Science, Gupta teaches, is everywhere you look.
For 36 years, this toy maker to the world has used his “toys from trash” to untangle the mystery behind concepts students often see as too boring or difficult. From village schools to the Ivy League, children have welcomed his experiments with a sparkle in their eyes. “Children love to make things,” Gupta says.
Think of Gupta and his DIY toys as a kind of elegant bridge between the old string-and-paper-cup telephone and current ideas about assigning short- and long-term, hands-on projects to students. Making something reinforces concepts and drives home lessons in a way that sitting at a desk and listening to a teacher does not, the theory goes. Gupta’s toys are fun, inexpensive projects kids can do at home when they’re noodling around but also classroom-appropriate assignments students can work on together.
India has produced some of the brightest minds in science, but some educators say that because the subject is still largely taught by the traditional lecture-and-textbook method it quashes children’s interest and access, especially for those attending rural schools that can’t afford science equipment.
“There is very little focus on application of knowledge and development of relevant practical skills in Indian schools,” researchers for the Agastya International Foundation, a nonprofit group that runs science programs for children in rural India, wrote in their 2007-2008 report.
“Today, we need children who are more curious and creative, and hands-on science lends itself to this task of nurturing these skills,” says Ramji Raghavan, founder of the organization.
Little by little, India’s education system is improving. More schools are emphasizing hands-on teaching, and special science programs are being introduced in rural schools. After-school programs are also popping up.
But it’s a slow process that can be met with resistance.
“When we were in school, it was lack of facilities and laboratory equipment that led to theoretical science lessons,” says Archana Suresh, a science teacher who runs an after-school program in Bangalore based on Gupta’s toys. Now, “it’s the pressure on teachers to complete the syllabus and get students to score in their exams that limits science education to just textbooks.”
So although Gupta’s unusual teaching methods and tools have delighted and taught science to thousands of children and adults, schools in India have yet to incorporate them into their curriculum.
GGupta graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, one of the most prestigious engineering colleges in the country, but prefers to call himself a tinkerer and toy maker.
Inspired by India’s political climate during the 1970s, Gupta, a 61-year-old Gandhian who has lived and worked in Maharashtra, Delhi and Madhya Pradesh in India, believes in serving the common people. He quotes a Lao Tzu saying to explain why he teaches the way he does: “Go to the people, love them, live with them, start from what they know and build on what they have.” Mix this with a drive to share new ideas and a childhood spent in a small town in Uttar Pradesh tinkering for hours with bits and bobs — treasures he hoarded in a little broken suitcase — and you come to understand Gupta’s passion for instilling the spirit of tinkering and exploring in the world’s children.
He didn’t intend this to be his life’s work.
In the 1970s, Gupta was employed as an engineer at what was then TELCO, India’s leading truck maker, in Pune. But then he took a leave of absence to teach science to kids in village schools, and that started him on a new path that became his life’s mission. In 1980, he quit his engineering job. He enjoyed demystifying the world of science much more. Picking up a whistle that he has fashioned from a discarded straw and blowing on it, he says, “Now, making things like this is way more fun than making trucks.”
Gupta worked for decades as a freelance science teacher and toy maker. Then, in 2003, he joined the Children’s Science Center at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Pune University. The center was among the first to pioneer the idea of simple, do-it-yourself science in India.
Along with three other science teachers at the center, Gupta began to videotape the process of making toys. The YouTube channel he launched in 2008 now has thousands of short science videos in 20 languages. He has hosted a science program for children on Indian national television, written 30 inexpensive science books, created hundreds of do-it-yourself experiments and held science workshops in more than 25 countries and in thousands of schools.
And now other educators across the country, especially in Bangalore, have begun to breath life back into science as a subject after coming across Gupta’s work.
“When kids use his experiments they understand what’s been taught in schools or at least begin thinking in a different way, and develop their curiosity,” says Vishal Bhatt, co-founder of Innovation & Science Promotion Foundation in Bangalore, which uses Gupta’s toys to teach science.
But, Bhatt adds, “when we go into schools to conduct these toys-from-trash sessions, some of the teachers there aren’t always welcoming because they think we are taking up precious class time that could be otherwise used to race through the curriculum.”
