February 2019 - Badri High School

The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Invent It

Badri High School is encouraging its youth towards programming and developing robots and preparing them to meet future challenges and excel in technology. Being a part of the Robotics team, I am pleased to see our prime movers thriving towards future exigency with curiosity and learning about new inventions and innovations.
Robotics is a versatile topic. It is a development of artificial intelligence. It is now the second year since Badri High School has started Robotics in collaboration with Robotics Lab to enhance students’ cognitive, affective and psychomotor skills.
Now we are reaping the fruits of the efforts of the last two years and the time has arrived where our young champs are showcasing their skills on a bigger platform, after performing extraordinarily well at the ROBO League in their own school as well as an interschool platform like EDVON Robotics League at NED Univeristy.
Five of our class 8 students: Abbas Fakhruddin, Mustafa Zakir, Hatim Yousuf, Arefa Amir and Insiya Mustansir—were selected to take part in the HERO BOTS competition on 10th February organized by Saifiyah Boys High School at Al Jamea Tus Saifiyah Auditorium. This reflected how BHS always offers equal opportunities to the girls as well as the boys and together as a team they worked to bring out the best in themselves.
It took the team weeks to practice and prepare themselves for speedy building and accurate programming of the GEN BOT. They sacrificed weekends to go to Robotics Lab and learn the nuances of programming. It was to be a challenging task as they would be required to manifest alert skills, quality of work, team effort and that too without knowing their final competition task.
As soon as the task was revealed on the big day, five of our champs started racking their minds to construct the robot. The first half of the competition was challenging for them and they secured 2nd position in constructing the robot.
But armed with determination they geared themselves and didn’t look back. They focused on programming the robot and completing their task. People were amazed to see our young engineers working. At the end of the three-hour contest they secured three awards:

Think Smart Award
Best Team Collaboration Award
Fastest Programming Award

This was a true culmination of efforts and motivated the Badri High School Robotics Department to continue to encouraging STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts & Math) Education to help students realize their potential and arm themselves with the knowledge to take on the fast approaching future.

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The Pre-Primary Students Celebrate Reading

It begins with the realisation that those straight and squiggly lines have some meaning.

The child then begins to decode the meaning of each squiggle. He can now understand that the sounds that he uses while talking correspond to a special symbol.

As he journeys deeper into the wonderland of reading, he learns to string the sounds and squiggles to make words which have meaning.

With stars in his eyes, he discovers that he can read!

He can read words!

He can read a series of words put together!

He can understand what all those wonderful words are trying to tell him!

This journey from squiggle to understanding to creating one’s own story has the potential to become a journey of love and reverence or a tedious task and a burden depending on how the child is exposed to it.

We want to make sure reading and writing become a lifelong passion for our students. For that:

We’ve introduced DEAR Time for our Juniors and Seniors during Circle time during which students and teachers all sit down with a book to read quietly.

The students are taking home a book in their library folder every weekend. They look forward to Friday to see which book they will get this time in their library folder. Of course, the child’s preference is also taken into account.

The Reading Day program with parents is running successfully with parents coming to read for pleasure with their children. We see parents just as enthusiastic about reading as the little ones.

The Reading Competition in Juniors and Seniors motivated the students to read. It was very difficult for our judges to crown the Reader of the Year. A tie-breaker round decided the winner in Seniors while the Junior winner won by a mere half point!

The love for reading has now begun to translate into creating picture stories by Juniors while the Seniors have embarked on a simultaneous journey of using words and sentences with invented spelling to write their own stories. Being able to read their story during assembly provides extrinsic motivation to the children to continue writing.

Story writing has become so popular in the Seniors that now we have to limit them to one turn per week for reading during assembly! Some of the passionate writers have also become proficient in creating a mind map, others can join together two sentences with and and but, and still others can write stories with a beginning, middle and end. The children are already displaying a glimpse of their own unique writing styles.