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Sadly, our IndiaFOSS plan (and our Foundation visit) got cancelled due to extreme weather conditions in Jagdalpur. Jagdalpur still suffers from the worst flood situation in 15 years.

Hopefully things get back to normal soon.

The show must go on. Harsh from our team represented us at IndiaFOSS 2026. We even had a beautifully designed variation of the CS17 brochures printed.

Zone of Proximal Development

This has to be the highlight of the week for me! Just today, early in the morning, I stumbled upon the concept of Zone of Proximal Development or ZPD for short. Here is a definition of this concept:

The zone of proximal development (ZPD) is a concept in educational psychology that represents the space between what a learner is capable of doing unsupported and what the learner cannot do even with support. It is the range where the learner is able to perform, but only with support from a teacher or a peer with more knowledge or expertise. ~ Wikipedia

Turns out, I have been using this concept to teach things up until now, but did not know that it was a concrete psychology concept 😄

In other words, if the students are taught outside the circle, they will get bored (if in the inner circle) or will get totally intimidated (outer circle). Learning happens in the ZPD circle, which sits between these two zones.

Teachers should assign tasks that students cannot do on their own, but which they can do with assistance; they should provide just enough assistance so that students learn to complete the tasks independently and then provide an environment that enables students to do harder tasks than would otherwise be possible. ~ Wikipedia (contd.)

Terminal

Apart from regular practice sessions with Kaushal and Shivam, I wrapped up some intermediate shell-related things like redirection and pipes. It is really satisfying to watch them go “tik tik tik” on their keyboards and give commands to the computer like a true dev!

FYI: all of the topics covered can be found in the teacher’s handbook, which is slowly turning out very solid.

First Problem Set for Q2

I worked on the very first problem set for Q2, which was obviously on interacting with the computer via terminal. This assignment is aimed at testing their understanding of the file system and using shell commands to interact with it. You can find the problem set here.

Month End Exams

We had decided after the last quarterly exams that we would conduct another exam with the same syllabus. Mathematics was conducted yesterday and CS will be conducted tomorrow. This will help us get confidence in the students’ readiness for the material that is yet to come.

Up Next

It is time now. Time to break into the world of computer programming.

After a revision session on Scratch, Flow Charts, & Algorithms, we will begin with the foundations of computer programming (“problem solving” is what I would like to call it) with Python!