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Greetings !

Hope you are doing well.

Operation Vasantha has been impacting the lives of disadvantaged rural children since 2009. This highly interactive    and    empowering    initiative addresses the problem of school dropouts. It also aims to educate families on the importance   of   education   and   engage dropouts    and   other    children    through interactive   activities   and   fun   learning sessions. These activities include parents counselling, health and hygiene camps and education on ecology.

Local college students are trained and given support from Agastya to teach children in their villages. These individuals willingly spend their evenings educating and inspiring weaker students and school dropouts from their villages.

During the quarter, Operation Vasantha Centres there were 1,61,977 student exposures.Special activites were-

• Essay Writing competition.
• Dwani Program- A program which is about  film-making where children shoot problems that they find in their communities and spread a message through short films.
• Earth Day celebration where Rally and plantation program was conducted.

Here is a case story of Karthik from one of the Operation Vasantha Centre -

Karthik spends his free time playing cricket and reading. He says of all the subjects he learns in school, science has always been his favourite. He says“I think science is interesting because, through it we get to learn about the world we live in and can  find an explanation for everything we see and experience around us.” He likes learning about electrical connections, how electricity is conducted, how magnets work, and how light travels. “I didn’t know that we could learn all these concepts by doing experiments by our own. I was always under the impression that the textbook was our only source of information. I like the Agastya classes because they taught us to question and think beyond the textbook. Over the past few years I have learnt more than I ever thought possible.”

His love for Physics, combined with his fascination with electricity, has led him to start experimenting with things he finds lying around his house. He managed to make a circuit that lit up a light bulb powered by lemons. He took a lemon, cut in half, and then connected a copper wire to one half of the lemon and a zinc wire to the other half. Both the wires were then connected to a bulb. The acids in the bulb and the properties of the wires, helped in conducting electricity and in lighting up the bulb.” Karthik says that he didn’t think he could do these kinds of experiments on his own. He says “I not only learnt so much, but I have also gained a sense of confidence that enables me to do these experiments on my own at home.”

Karthik wants to grow up to become a scientist. He wants to be an inventor who would be able to make robots that will help people. The robots that can be used in war times so that we don’t have to lose people. He also hopes to invent a robot that’ll help people out in their homes – a domestic help robot so that people can concentrate on doing more important things with their time.”

Karthik hopes to keep working on his physics so that one day he will be able to achieve this goals. He says“I hope that with the support that I get from the Agastya instructors, I will be able to make more complicated connections and eventually be able to make a fully functioning robot!” 

Links:

• http://www.agastya.org