During my summer vacations, I volunteered to teach math in a public school in a poor neighborhood of India’s second largest city, Lucknow, my hometown. Initially, many students attended my classes out of interest. They were intrigued that an urban youth had come all the way, away from the comforts of the city; wanted to ‘teach’ them! I was glad that my class had full attendance, if only it was out of interest in me and not the subject. However, a few days into the week changed the landscape – now my students were getting interested; wanted to learn. One day, Jalil and a few others expressed their desire to learn math, especially geometric shapes and their properties. Starting with Plane geometry, I handled flat objects, like triangles and lines that were two-dimensional, which I could draw on a blackboard; my students could do the same in …show more content…
Therefore, I found I was looking at confused faces and questioning eyes, as my students did not understand the chalkboard drawings of pyramids. Again, it was Jalil, who requested that I show them a model pyramid, as they would understand what I was talking about on seeing the object. As no shops in the village sold models; I could not make a round trip to the city. In the absence of transport, I needed to think of another way by which to ‘show’ my class what a pyramid looked like. That is when I created a program that gave complete information about pyramids in JAVA, being proficient in that besides, HTML5, JavaScript and MySQL. On the day I was to ‘show’ a pyramid structure in four dimensions, I was happy that I had bought my laptop along. Finally, a pyramid came alive on my Mac’s fifteen-inch screen, my students were thrilled to see the structure; excited to behold and handle my machine. However, that did give me a few anxious moments. Eventually, I showed my class how to calculate