Guests take a look inside the math lab at BSS.

From now on, students of Ballygunge Shiksha Sadan (BSS) will have a new weapon to fight the math bugbear. The Pythagoras theorem need not be memorised as the Geo board can help them understand it better.

On June 25, the school threw open the NIIT e-guru math lab, a laboratory where mathematics concepts can be illustrated through demonstrations. BSS managing committee president HK Malpani, its principal Sunita Sen, and president of school learning solutions-NIIT L Balasubramanian addressed the audience. While Sen asserted how the lab would enable the students to learn and verify mathematics formulae in an exciting way, Subramanian said it would empower young minds and unleash their creativity. BSS is the first school in Kolkata and in the north-eastern region to have NIIT’s math lab. The facilities come for a price of Rs 12,00,000. It is available for students of Classes V-X. Laboratory work will be part of the curriculum and no extra fee will be charged for it. Twelve other private schools in India are equipped with NIIT’s math lab.

Said Balasubramanian: “We plan to set up math labs in government schools at special rates.” Mathematics and statistics teacher Vasundhara Rangarajan demonstrated the workings of the Geometer’s Sketchpad. This software measures the angles of a triangle and can verify the sum of its angles. It can be used to prove other geometrical theorems.