GIFT THE GIFT OF EDUCATION TO AN UNDER-SERVED GIRL

Established in 1996, Literacy India (LI) is a non-profit organization with the primary objective of providing quality education and skill training to under-served children and under-privileged women to empower and help them become self-reliant. To fulfil this objective, LI decided to build its programmatic approach on 4 pillars i.e. Education, Empowerment, Employability and Environment. These 4Es, like a beacon, help guide the organisation to bring about positive change in the lives of its target beneficiaries/ communities.

Literacy India has been advocating technology-aided education and enhancing digital skills for over two decades. In sync with the requirements of Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), Literacy India has pioneered the delivery of future skills training and engendering STEM aptitude among its students in an integrated education format. With the onset of 4IR the nature of jobs are changing, and so are the desired education and skill set this is also evident from the change in school curriculum as directed under the latest Education Policy by the Government of India i.e. NEP 2020.

The importance of an early interventions and introduction of NEP in the Middle and Elementary schools has been supported by a number of government and non-government reports suggesting that adopting a strong STEM background at an early age in the life of a student will encourage tech- empowered participation. This will help the country and its citizenry in reaping the early bird advantage as students proceed through middle, high school, and on to post-secondary education.

Literacy India has already set up Robotics &  Digital Labs in its schools and these laboratories serve as spaces that allow students to explore, experiment, tinker and create. Under the LI’s Future Skills project there are two component one, teaching fundamentals of coding Scratch, Python and second, creating Applications using MIT app inventor as well robotics introduced advanced Artificial Intelligence kit - WHALESBOT MODULE 2.0. This is introduced to the students with new components, sensors, processors, actuators etc. Programming software – SCRATCH is used for coding the Robots. Presentation on new Robotic Kit with videos were shown to the students like Gearing parts, structural parts, and appearance parts. Whales Bot Al Module 2 has more than 480 parts which function as gearing parts, structural parts, connectors, and appearance parts Children can build diverse teaching and competition projects upon these parts.These programs build competencies that allow individuals to solve complex problems in highly emergent contexts of action in a self-organized way and enable them to act successfully.

Meet Our Junior Coder

Name: Anu ( Name Changed)  Grade: VIII

Anu (Name changed) is a student of grade 8th in Literacy India Vidyapeeth School. She comes from a family where her elder sister studying Engineering with Literacy India support and she is also interested in studying science. Father is not supportive and mother is the breadwinner in family. Due to constant lockdown situation in 2020 and early 2021, the academic studies of children were conducted online through Google meet. Anu’s marks in Maths and science were not good when online exams were conducted in 2020. But after opening of schools in 2021 in the month of July she was enthusiastically looking forward to attending her classes. She was very excited to attend her robotics class because it is very engaging and was fun to learn & understand the concepts of science. She is a very creative girl and enjoys drawing. This creative skill helped her in designing the bots. She is one of the promising students of Robotics as per her teacher. She participates in all the activities of class, she understands the coding of bots quite well and has a knack of picking up complex algorithms with ease. Her interest in science subject has grown many fold and in last examination she scored good marks compared to previous exams. During her project presentation she has made a Catapult Robot and also participated in the School’s Independence Day’s thematic event of Robotics and made a Battle Tank prototype that was highly appreciated by one and all.

Links:

• Journey of Literacy India- People and Projects