Master toys designer: Arvind Gupta

“Science principles are best understood if they are incorporated into play toys,” says Arvind Gupta, coordinator of the Children‚s Science Centre of the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune, a hi-tech research facility open to scientists of all Indian universities. An electronics engineering graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur, and winner of several awards for popularising science, Gupta is the author of 12 books on science education and has conceptualised, scripted, and directed 75 science documentary films for national telecasts. “For the past 25 years, I have been teaching students to make toys from simple materials, old newspapers, slippers, matchboxes, broomsticks, ball pen refills, film cans, discarded cycle tubes. This not only stimulates creativity in children but also helps them to better remember scientific principles and formulae,” says this master toys designer and UNESCO science teaching consultant, who has advised science educators in the US, UK, Sweden, Japan, France, Finland and Pakistan. Inaugurated in 2004, the Children’s Science Centre supported by a recurring annual maintenance grant of Rs.5 lakh awarded by the Mumbai-based Sir Ratan Tata Trust, and a one-time capital grant (utilised for construction of the admin block, from the estate of the late Marathi writer Pu La Deshpande), attracts class IV-X students from over 400 schools in Pune and neighbouring districts every week.”They bring old newspapers, used photocopy papers, scissors, scale, glue, old slippers and assorted paraphernalia which is used to make newspaper caps, colour mixers, rotating hexaflexagons, flapping birds, matchbox riders, rolling toys, soda straw flutes, whirling wool, film bottle pump to inflate a balloon, numbers fund with a calendar etc,” says Gupta. Constrained to survive on a shoestring budget of Rs.5 lakh per year (though the Union government’s department of science and technology chipped in with Rs.2 lakh for books and equipment in the first year, it hasn‚t been renewed), recently the centre experienced an unexpected windfall. Impressed with its ingenuity, last year an anonymous donor anted up Rs.10 lakh with a promise to pay Rs.10 lakh more shortly. “We are planning to raise a corpus of Rs.1 crore so that we have a contingencies reserve. But money doesn‚t run this centre; the driving force is the passion of the staff. The Rs.5 lakh grant is sufficient for our needs,” says Gupta philosophically. Michael Gonsalves (Pune) Also read: Science fiction builds children’s Imagination Facebook Twitter LinkedIn WhatsApp