A class VI student of Delhi’s famous Delhi Public School, R.K. Puram, Shivansh Chaturvedi was included in the delegation of the Delhi-based Science Popularisation Association of Communicators & Educators (SPACE) which visited Russia from July 27-August 4. The delegation comprised astronomers, scientists and five students who together with their Russian counterparts experimented with eclipse photography (corona, diamond ring), visual observation and recording, coronal spectrography and spectra analysis, temperature variations, shadow band recording etc during the total solar eclipse on August 1 in that part of the world.
Shivansh (11) earned this opportunity on the basis of being ranked first in SPACE’s online ‘Solar Expedition Heliodyssey 2008’ test for students of classes VI-XII conducted in Delhi on May 10. The other four students in the team were Kaustubh Bansal of DPS R.K. Puram; V. Viskayaa of Apeejay School, Delhi; Charchit Gaur of Vikasa School, Tamil Nadu; and Utkarsh Agarwal of St. Paul’s, Rajasthan.
Heliodyssey is a SPACE project which tracks total solar eclipses around the world and performs experiments to popularise this celestial event. Shivansh has been assigned an experiment on ‘wind speed variation’ and the ‘solar eclipse watch’.
The team is scheduled to travel to St. Petersburg, Moscow and proceed to Novosibirsk, Siberia (where the eclipse will be total). In Moscow Space City they will learn firsthand about living in outer space. “We will return with important new knowledge,” Shivansh told EducationWorld.
Preparing and prevailing in the Solar Expedition Heliodyssey online test last May was made easier by Shivansh’s voracious reading appetite. Encouraged by his doctor mother from a very early age, Shivansh has already been through a library of reading material and authors Roald Dahl, R. K. Narayan, Ruskin Bond, Terry Deary and Bill Waterson.
Yet young Shivansh is no bookworm. He plays in the school’s junior hockey and soccer teams, has a flair for solving math conundrums, and bagged the first prize in the Scholastic Reading Contest in 2006. According to him “an effective mix of academics, parenting and informed teachers” gave him these early opportunities. And since space fires his imagination, his ambition is to join ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) and make it “as good as NASA” (National Aeronautics and Space Agency), USA.
Autar Nehru (Delhi)