Tokyo Day 6- Ueno park and Akihabara Electric town

The previous post in the series is here..

We checked into the Tokyo Dome hotel, had chai in our rooms and came out to go back to Ueno Park. It was around 4PM. We walked through the same path we missed the previous evening. Turns out there were no blossoms. We had experienced the best of Ueno park the previous evening at golden hour.

The rest of the group gave me a look that could simply be summarized in one word “Thoo!”. Well, they did not want to disappoint the photographer. I made my apologies and we were deciding where to go. Our walking buddy had called us and asked if we went to the electronic city where there are all electronic stores.

We had no idea, did some googling and found that it was actually where we had stayed the previous day!

We took a cab to Akihabara area and found this LED lit crossing where they sold electronics and video games. Interesting crowd of people all with hair died in all kinds of gold and blue and purple like in video game ads. There was a large electronics store. We walked through all the floors and decided that they were as pricey as the US. We needed some power banks. So we got a power bank each and that was that.

A video highlight reel

When we came out of this area it was already starting to get dark. So we decided to go from here to the main attraction of the evening..

USB stands for..

One of the new pre bedtime activities with the kids is "Playing" Snapcircuit!

When we were little, our favorite playing was a "mechano-set", which was a bunch of steel parts with screws, nuts and bolts and we could make mechanical models of automobiles, airplanes etc.

Somehow we never got introduced to the electronics plug and play games. Now that I get to relive my childhood with the girls, this is really fun for me as well as for them.

Trying to teach them I = V/R and forward vs. reverse bias on an LED is fun. They like to do more of the mechanical

follow the book

make the circuit look like the picture

turn on slide switch and see what happens

method while I insisted on making them read the instructions first, then build the circuit and read the explanations for what they just did. After figuring out that they were in a rush to finish "making" all 300 circuits, put the brakes on.

Now the bedtime quiz is not what we call "Tamil Mirugam and Ragam" (the bedtime quiz was a hodgepodge of questions that were either about Tamil-English and vice versa translations, animal trivia or Carnatic Music Raga identification) anymore. Every alternate day is Snapquiz!

Questions are like :

What is S1 and what does it do?

What is an IC?

What is the unit of measuring resistance?

If you increase the resistance in this circuit from 100 Ohms to 1000 Ohms, what happens?

etc.

Both the kids are now very receptive to the Snapquiz and are answering the usual questions very fast. Now the question bank is increasing slowly. 

Recently I asked them "What does USB stand for?" after the little one mentioned that "all power comes from USB's!". Guess she is used to charging all the devices she uses using an USB cable and she thinks the B in USB stands for some battery!

Jr.s' answer? "Use it. Succeed with it. Bring it everywhere!" . While that was the most creative BS way of saying "I don't know!" she did crack me up and got a lot of hugs and kisses for making us laugh.

Then when they heard the correct answer was "Universal Serial Bus" the little one goes "What does USB have to with Cheerios?"..

We have ways to go and there will be many more "snapquizzies" in the days to come to figure out the relationship between Cheerios and USB.