Turning trash into toys for learning | Arvind Gupta

507,954 views ・ 2011-05-02

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

00:15
My name is Arvind Gupta, and I'm a toymaker.
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I've been making toys for the last 30 years.
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The early '70s, I was in college.
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It was a very revolutionary time.
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It was a political ferment, so to say --
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students out in the streets of Paris,
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revolting against authority.
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America was jolted
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by the anti-Vietnam movement, the Civil Rights movement.
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In India, we had the Naxalite movement,
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the [unclear] movement.
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But you know, when there is a political churning of society,
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it unleashes a lot of energy.
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The National Movement of India
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was testimony to that.
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Lots of people resigned from well-paid jobs
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and jumped into the National Movement.
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Now in the early '70s,
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one of the great programs in India
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was to revitalize
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primary science in village schools.
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There was a person, Anil Sadgopal, did a Ph.D. from Caltech
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and returned back as a molecular biologist
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in India's cutting-edge research institute, the TIFR.
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At 31, he was not able
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to relate the kind of [unclear] research,
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which he was doing with the lives of the ordinary people.
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So he designed and went and started a village science program.
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Many people were inspired by this.
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The slogan of the early '70s
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was "Go to the people.
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Live with them; love them.
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Start from what they know. Build on what they have."
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This was kind of the defining slogan.
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Well I took one year.
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I joined Telco, made TATA trucks, pretty close to Pune.
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I worked there for two years,
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and I realized that I was not born to make trucks.
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Often one doesn't know what one wants to do,
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but it's good enough to know what you don't want to do.
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So I took one year off, and I went to this village science program.
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And it was a turning point.
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It was a very small village --
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a weekly bazaar
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where people, just once in a week, they put in all the vats.
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So I said, "I'm going to spend a year over here."
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So I just bought one specimen
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of everything which was sold on the roadside.
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And one thing which I found
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was this black rubber.
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This is called a cycle valve tube.
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When you pump in air in a bicycle, you use a bit of this.
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And some of these models --
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so you take a bit of this cycle valve tube,
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you can put two matchsticks inside this, and you make a flexible joint.
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It's a joint of tubes. You start by teaching angles --
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an acute angle, a right angle, an obtuse angle, a straight angle.
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It's like its own little coupling.
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If you have three of them, and you loop them together,
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well you make a triangle.
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With four, you make a square,
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you make a pentagon, you make a hexagon,
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you make all these kind of polygons.
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And they have some wonderful properties.
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If you look at the hexagon, for instance,
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it's like an amoeba, which is constantly changing its own profile.
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You can just pull this out, this becomes a rectangle.
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You give it a push, this becomes a parallelogram.
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But this is very shaky.
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Look at the pentagon, for instance,
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pull this out -- it becomes a boat shape trapezium.
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Push it and it becomes house shaped.
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This becomes an isosceles triangle --
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again, very shaky.
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This square might look very square and prim.
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Give it a little push -- this becomes a rhombus.
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It becomes kite-shaped.
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But give a child a triangle,
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he can't do a thing to it.
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Why use triangles?
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Because triangles are the only rigid structures.
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We can't make a bridge with squares
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because the train would come, it would start doing a jig.
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Ordinary people know about this
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because if you go to a village in India,
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they might not have gone to engineering college,
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but no one makes a roof placed like this.
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Because if they put tiles on top, it's just going to crash.
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They always make a triangular roof.
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Now this is people science.
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And if you were to just poke a hole over here
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and put a third matchstick,
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you'll get a T joint.
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And if I were to poke all the three legs of this
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in the three vertices of this triangle,
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I would make a tetrahedron.
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So you make all these 3D shapes.
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You make a tetrahedron like this.
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And once you make these,
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you make a little house.
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Put this on top.
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You can make a joint of four. You can make a joint of six.
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You just need a ton.
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Now this was -- you make a joint of six,
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you make an icosahedron.
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You can play around with it.
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This makes an igloo.
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Now this is in 1978.
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I was a 24-year-old young engineer.
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And I thought this was so much better than making trucks.
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(Applause)
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If you, as a matter of fact, put four marbles inside,
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you simulate the molecular structure of methane, CH4.
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Four atoms of hydrogen, the four points of the tetrahedron,
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which means the little carbon atom.
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Well since then,
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I just thought that I've been really privileged
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to go to over 2,000 schools in my country --
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village schools, government schools,
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municipal schools, Ivy League schools --
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I've been invited by most of them.
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And every time I go to a school,
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I see a gleam in the eyes of the children.
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I see hope. I see happiness in their faces.
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Children want to make things. Children want to do things.
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Now this, we make lots and lots of pumps.
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Now this is a little pump
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with which you could inflate a balloon.
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It's a real pump. You could actually pop the balloon.
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And we have a slogan
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that the best thing a child can do with a toy is to break it.
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So all you do is --
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it's a very kind of provocative statement --
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this old bicycle tube and this old plastic [unclear]
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This filling cap will go very snugly into an old bicycle tube.
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And this is how you make a valve.
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You put a little sticky tape.
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This is one-way traffic.
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Well we make lots and lots of pumps.
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And this is the other one --
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that you just take a straw, and you just put a stick inside
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and you make two half-cuts.
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Now this is what you do,
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is you bend both these legs into a triangle,
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and you just wrap some tape around.
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And this is the pump.
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And now, if you have this pump,
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it's like a great, great sprinkler.
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It's like a centrifuge.
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If you spin something, it tends to fly out.
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(Applause)
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Well in terms of -- if you were in Andhra Pradesh,
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you would make this with the palmyra leaf.
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Many of our folk toys
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have great science principles.
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If you spin-top something, it tends to fly out.
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If I do it with both hands, you can see this fun Mr. Flying Man.
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Right.
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This is a toy which is made from paper. It's amazing.
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There are four pictures.
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You see insects,
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you see frogs, snakes, eagles, butterflies,
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frogs, snakes, eagles.
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Here's a paper which you could [unclear] --
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designed by a mathematician at Harvard in 1928,
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Arthur Stone,
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documented by Martin Gardner in many of his many books.
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But this is great fun for children.
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They all study about the food chain.
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The insects are eaten by the frogs; the frogs are eaten by the snakes;
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the snakes are eaten by the eagles.
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And this can be, if you had a whole photocopy paper --
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A4 size paper --
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you could be in a municipal school, you could be in a government school --
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a paper, a scale and a pencil -- no glue, no scissors.
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In three minutes, you just fold this up.
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And what you could use it for is just limited by your imagination.
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If you take a smaller paper, you make a smaller flexagon.
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With a bigger one, you make a bigger one.
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Now this is a pencil with a few slots over here.
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And you put a little fan here.
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And this is a hundred-year-old toy.
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There have been six major research papers on this.
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There's some grooves over here, you can see.
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And if I take a reed -- if I rub this,
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something very amazing happens.
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Six major research papers on this.
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As a matter of fact, Feynman, as a child, was very fascinated by this.
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He wrote a paper on this.
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And you don't need the three billion-dollar Hadron Collider
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for doing this. (Laughter) (Applause)
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This is there for every child,
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and every child can enjoy this.
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If you want to put a colored disk,
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well all these seven colors coalesce.
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And this is what Newton talked about 400 years back,
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that white light's made of seven colors,
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just by spinning this around.
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This is a straw.
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What we've done, we've just sealed both the ends with tape,
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nipped the right corner and the bottom left corner,
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so there's holes in the opposite corners, there's a little hole over here.
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This is a kind of a blowing straw.
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I just put this inside this.
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There's a hole here, and I shut this.
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And this costs very little money to make --
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great fun for children to do.
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What we do
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is make a very simple electric motor.
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Now this is the simplest motor on Earth.
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The most expensive thing is the battery inside this.
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If you have a battery, it costs five cents to make it.
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This is an old bicycle tube,
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which gives you a broad rubber band, two safety pins.
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This is a permanent magnet.
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Whenever current flows through the coil, this becomes an electromagnet.
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It's the interaction of both these magnets
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which makes this motor spin.
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We made 30,000.
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Teachers who have been teaching science for donkey years,
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they just muck up the definition and they spit it out.
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When teachers make it, children make it.
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You can see a gleam in their eye.
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They get a thrill
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of what science is all about.
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And this science is not a rich man's game.
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In a democratic country,
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science must reach to our most oppressed,
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to the most marginalized children.
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This program started with 16 schools
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and spread to 1,500 government schools.
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Over 100,000 children learn science this way.
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And we're just trying to see possibilities.
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Look, this is the tetrapak --
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awful materials from the point of view of the environment.
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There are six layers -- three layers of plastic, aluminum --
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which are are sealed together.
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They are fused together, so you can't separate them.
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Now you can just make a little network like this
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and fold them and stick them together
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and make an icosahedron.
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So something which is trash,
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which is choking all the seabirds,
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you could just recycle this into a very, very joyous --
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all the platonic solids can be made with things like this.
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This is a little straw,
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and what you do is you just nip two corners here,
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and this becomes like a baby crocodile's mouth.
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You put this in your mouth, and you blow.
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(Honk)
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It's children's delight, a teacher's envy, as they say.
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You're not able to see how the sound is produced,
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because the thing which is vibrating goes inside my mouth.
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I'm going to keep this outside, to blow out. I'm going to suck in air.
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(Honk)
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So no one actually needs to muck up the production of sound
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with wire vibrations.
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The other is that you keep blowing at it,
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keep making the sound,
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and you keep cutting it.
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And something very, very nice happens.
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(Honk)
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(Applause)
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And when you get a very small one --
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(Honk)
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This is what the kids teach you. You can also do this.
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Well before I go any further,
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this is something worth sharing.
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This is a touching slate meant for blind children.
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This is strips of Velcro, this is my drawing slate,
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and this is my drawing pen,
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which is basically a film box.
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It's basically like a fisherman's line,
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a fishing line.
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And this is wool over here.
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If I crank the handle, all the wool goes inside.
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And what a blind child can do is to just draw this.
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Wool sticks on Velcro.
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There are 12 million blind children in our country --
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(Applause)
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who live in a world of darkness.
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And this has come as a great boon to them.
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There's a factory out there making our children blind,
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not able to provide them with food,
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not able to provide them with vitamin A.
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But this has come as a great boon for them.
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There are no patents. Anyone can make it.
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This is very, very simple.
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You can see, this is the generator. It's a crank generator.
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These are two magnets.
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This is a large pulley made by sandwiching rubber between two old CDs.
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Small pulley and two strong magnets.
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And this fiber turns a wire attached to an LED.
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If I spin this pulley, the small one's going to spin much faster.
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There will be a spinning magnetic field.
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Lines, of course, would be cut, the force will be generated.
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And you can see, this LED is going to glow.
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So this is a small crank generator.
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Well, this is, again,
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it's just a ring, a steel ring with steel nuts.
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And what you can do
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is just, if you give it a twirl,
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well they just keep going on.
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And imagine a bunch of kids
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standing in a circle
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and just waiting for the steel ring to be passed on.
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And they'd be absolutely joyous playing with this.
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Well in the end, what we can also do:
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we use a lot of old newspapers
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to make caps.
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This is worthy of Sachin Tendulkar.
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It's a great cricket cap. (Laughter) (Applause)
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When first you see Nehru and Gandhi,
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this is the Nehru cap -- just half a newspaper.
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We make lots of toys with newspapers,
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and this is one of them.
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And this is -- you can see --
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this is a flapping bird.
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All of our old newspapers, we cut them into little squares.
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And if you have one of these birds --
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children in Japan have been making this bird for many, many years.
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And you can see,
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this is a little fantail bird.
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Well in the end, I'll just end with a story.
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This is called "The Captain's Hat Story."
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The captain was a captain of a sea-going ship.
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It goes very slowly.
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And there were lots of passengers on the ship,
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and they were getting bored, so the captain invited them on the deck.
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"Wear all your colorful clothes and sing and dance,
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and I'll provide you with good food and drinks."
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And the captain would wear a cap everyday
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and join in the regalia.
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The first day, it was a huge umbrella cap,
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like a captain's cap.
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That night, when the passengers would be sleeping,
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he would give it one more fold,
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and the second day, he would be wearing a fireman's cap --
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with a little shoot just like a designer cap,
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because it protects the spinal cord.
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And the second night, he would take the same cap
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and give it another fold.
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And the third day, it would be a Shikari cap --
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just like an adventurer's cap.
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And the third night, he would give it two more folds --
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and this is a very, very famous cap.
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If you've seen any of our Bollywood films,
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this is what the policeman wears,
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it's called a zapalu cap.
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It's been catapulted to international glory.
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And we must not forget that he was the captain of the ship.
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So that's a ship.
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And now the end:
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everyone was enjoying the journey very much.
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They were singing and dancing.
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Suddenly there was a storm and huge waves.
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And all the ship can do is to dance and pitch along with the waves.
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A huge wave comes and slaps the front
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and knocks it down.
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And another one comes and slaps the aft and knocks it down.
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And there's a third one over here.
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This swallows the bridge and knocks it down.
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And the ship sinks,
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and the captain has lost everything,
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but for a life jacket.
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Thank you so much.
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(Applause)
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About this website

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