Educator spotlight: Mr. Sundaram, Principal, Atul Vidyalaya, Valsad, India

• June 24, 2008
• admin
• 2 comments

Now that Math Buddy is officially launched, we wanted to take a minute to acknowledge the contribution of one math educator who has been a source of tremendous inspiration for us. To be very frank, when we started off Math Buddy, we were experimenting with various ideas on how we can contribute to Math education, but did not find satisfaction with any of the approaches.

It was my visit to Atul Vidyalaya in September 2007 to meet Mr. Sundaram that defined our direction and gave us the confidence that what we were attempting was something that was going to be beneficial to educators and learners. I was impressed by his passion and love towards Mathematics, and his ways of explaining the concepts in very simple, logical and practical manner which he attributed to his mentor, Dr. P. K. Srinivasan. Mr. Sundaram has devoted himself to helping to improve the quality of Math education by going around the country organizing workshops for teachers to help them use conceptual methods for teaching using simple physical objects.

Mr. Sundaram had created an excellent Mathematics lab at Atul Vidyalaya, and had trained his teachers to imbibe his vision and methods to help kids understand the concepts behind Math. During our discussion, we could see that a lot of his ideas were amenable to implementation using the electronic medium and were in line with what we were trying to do with Math Buddy. He volunteered to create the first topic on teaching number systems using simple activities, which has served as the blue print for most of the topics that we have at Math Buddy.

I have met Mr. Sundaram a few times during our development of Math Buddy, and he has always been supportive, encouraging and providing newer ideas to improve on what we were doing.

Mentor magazine (http://www.mentormagazine.net) published a cover story on Mr. Sundaram in their November 2007 issue. I will try getting their permission to attach a PDF version of their article.

Thank you, Mr. Sundaram for your support and contributions to the development of Math Buddy!

Click here to access Math Buddy