How Fossils Form: Iron, Time, and Selective Replacement in a Forty-Million-Year-Old Crocodile Skull
How fossils form is one of the questions children begin asking very young. The honest answer takes them into chemistry, deep time, and the slow conversation between organic matter and the rocks around it that unfolds over millions of years. Our Research Head, Sreemoyee Chakraborty, recently posted a short report with Professor Dhurjati Prasad Sengupta […]
What Happens When a Teenager Asks for Summer Homework: Research Identity in a Montessori Adolescent Program
In the final session of a four-week palaeontology program I ran for the Erdkinder cohort at our school, one of the students asked me if she could have summer homework. The school year was about to close. She wanted, before it did, to know what she could keep working on through the holidays. She did […]
Why Twelve Adolescents Started a Palaeontology Program and Three Finished It: Attrition as Evidence in Erdkinder Montessori
Twelve adolescents at our school joined the first session of a four-week palaeontology program this April. Eight returned for Session 2. Four returned for Session 3. Three completed Session 4 and continued working with us after the school year ended. The numbers are the most useful single data point in the case study, Blue Blocks […]
Self-Expression in Montessori: How a Five-Year-Old Speaks to a Stranger Without Help
A five-year-old stood at his stall at our annual school event and explained his project to visitors he had never met before. He had no script. No adult prompted him. The visitors had not been prepared in advance with the right questions. His father, watching from a few feet away, told us afterwards: “He’s just […]
The Three Streams: How Blue Blocks Brought Research Methodology to a Student Satellite Mission
The first iteration of the Students of Blue Blocks (SBB) satellite — SBB-1 — was the work of the adolescent cohort at Blue Blocks Montessori School in Hyderabad: the concept, the design, the iteration cycles, the qualification: all of it was theirs. The school enabled the work; Pavan Goyal, in his role as Principal Investigator, […]
Announcing SBB-2: Blue Blocks’ Next Student-Built Satellite Was Unveiled at AMI Congress 2026
On 12 January 2026, a satellite payload built by adolescents at our school in Hyderabad sat inside an ISRO rocket on the launchpad at Sriharikota. The countdown started. The rocket lifted. A few seconds later, the launch vehicle experienced an anomaly, and the cargo it carried — including SBB-1, our first student-built satellite — was […]