Manish Jain and Jay Thakkar

Teaching Professor, Senior Project Associate
Center for Creative Learning
Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India
https://ccl.iitgn.ac.in/

This is a 'Reciprocal Dome' made using only bamboo sticks and tie bands to join them together. It takes 720 sticks of 5 different sizes, 3600 ties and 5-50 hours of labour, depending on how LAZY you are.
Prof Manish Jain is a teaching associate professor at IIT Gandhinagar and heads the Center for Creating Learning. The Center has been working to transform STEM education in India and communicate Science and Maths in an engaging manner to the public since the last 5 years. It has conducted workshops for over 10,000 teachers and developed over 1000 activities and models and has reached over 5 lakh teachers and students. Also, the online programs have received an online viewership of over 1 crore.

6v Reciprocal Geodesic out of Bamboo strips
6v Reciprocal Geodesic out of Bamboo strips
300 x 300 x 300 cm
Bamboo
2019
https://youtu.be/8iN1Nf0CsWU
We take a regular icosahedron and divide each side of its 20 triangles into 6 equal parts, creating a 6v (frequency) geodesic sphere. The design has 360 edges and to get more strength and stability, we duplicate all edges. We calculated the distance at which the holes should be placed in the bamboo sticks, using Spherical Geometry. This makes the edges stay intact due to friction. The Center for Creative Learning made the 25-feet largest Geodesic ball, probably the largest Geodesic ball in India, made up of bamboo. The design is inspired by the Bamboo Shelter project Indonesia.
Sine and Triangular Waveform Cars using MDF Sheet
Sine and Triangular Waveform Cars using MDF Sheet
15 x 20 x 30 cm
Medium Density Fiber Board (MDF)
2018
https://youtu.be/g3MOvsFWcd8

This is a car with a pen in front draws a sine curve when moved forward. Also, changing the top module will result in an another trace, a triangular wave. Further, adjustments to different aspects of the construction lead to changes in the frequency or the amplitude of the waveform. This is driven entirely by the mechanism that is fitted on the front wheels. By additional tweaks to the rear wheels and by shifting the location of where the pen attaches to the overall mechanism, we also design cars that can “draw” linear combinations of the sine and the cosine functions. By additional circles on the car, we can get Fourier series, we can add any number of sinusoids so as to approximate any function.