STEM Education for At-Risk Children in India

First of all, we want to thank all of our donors and supporters.  It is truly you who are making the difference. Without funding for our programs, we would not be able to provide life changing programs to the vulnerable children we serve. We have a current goal of $40,000 to fully fund this program and right now we are just $11,000 shy of our goal. We absolutely believe that we can meet our goal, hundreds of children depend on it.

Who are the children we want to bring the Mobile Play and Learning to? They are children living in India’s orphanages, institutions and impoverished slums. These children are ignored by their local communities, face gender and class discrimination, live isolated lives and, these are children deprived of play, learning and nurturing connections with adults and mentors. The results are devastating; early and forced marriage, forced labor, homelessness, and trafficking into the sex trade.

We have solutions. Through the Mobile Play and Learning platform, children engage in STEM and arts activities which develops their critical thinking, problem solving and ability to collaborate and leadership skills. Age appropriate workshops stimulate an actual love of learning and a desire to further educational and future employment goals. This program also provides marginalized children the invaluable opportunity to become connected with mentoring adults, which has been shown to be one the most important predictors of a positive future.

The Mobile Play and Learning Center has been bringing educational workshops to children from age 5 to 18 over the past 18 months and the feedback is just incredible. 5 girls in grades 9^th and 10^th standard who have participating since the start have shared that they had not thought about going beyond the 10^th grade, but they now realize that they could go on to college. They are now talking about wanting to study to become a teacher, an architect, and to have a career in business. They are utilizing resources opened-up to them by our team of facilitators and mentors.  Younger children are learning to work together on projects that truly interest them. They are developing problem solving skills and working with their hands. They are proud of their work and love the connections to their workshop leaders.    

The goal on my end is to ensure that we can continue to bring our Mobile Play and Learning workshops on a regular basis to the children who have begun this journey with us and to be able to visit new locations and change the lives of many, many more children who need this opportunity to thrive! This is where you come in by making a donation and sharing our story.

Next month we will offer a week-long camp and begin a couple of new partnerships with some incredible organizations.

Stay tuned for our next update!!

Jenny

Hello to our fabulous supporters!

 In mid-November we launched our Rube Goldstein Machine Workshops and we have you to thank for getting us to this point! 

The Limitless Child Mobile Play and Learning Center, a converted rickshaw serving as a maker space for children on wheels, literally rolled into the ASHA Community Center in Janata Vasant, a large slum community in Pune, for a series of 3 exciting sessions! Following this, the Mobile Play and Learning Center made its way to Renuka Mahajan Trust Orphanage where another 3 sessions took place.

The results were incredible!  The children at both locations loved the workshops and got totally into their machine creation!  As we wrote in an earlier report, Rube Goldstein machines are designed to be overly complicated contraptions that address everyday problems. This type of project has gained worldwide acceptance as a way of engaging young students in many aspects of design thinking and basic physics based on cause and effect and energy transfer.  See the photos to get an idea of what our students came up with for watering a plant or popping a balloon, it’s truly amazing work!

We conducted in depth pre- and post-assessments for this round of workshops and look forward to sharing the results with you once we have everything reviewed and translated, but the verbal feedback was indisputably positive. The older kids at ASHA said that they learned so much about cause and effect and the need to work together as a team, as well as the importance of testing and retesting, having patience and “learning from mistakes” was a big take away. The younger kids at Renuka Mahajan Trust made more simplistic machines, but used much the same materials and all the same skills were required. Obviously, the level of patience was a bit less, but non-the-less, the kids did a fantastic job and learned a lot.

This unique approach to empowering children who would likely never have the chance to learn in this way is something we strongly believe in and we are proving that it works! Some of the students have expressed more of an interest in science and say they have a better understanding of why experimentation is necessary when trying to come up with new and better ways of doing or making things.

We plan to offer our next round of workshops in April and we plan to add another community group and orphanage to the schedule. We look forward to increasing this program 2-fold in the coming year.  We will continue to work with ASHA and Renuka, because the on-going programing is what will make the biggest impact on these kids’ lives and educational outcomes.We will also add 2 additional locations.

Please ensure that we can continue to grow by contributing to our efforts through sharing this project information with others who might be interested in learning more and please continue to support our work yourself through future donations, it truly means the world to us and the children we serve.

Sincerely,

Jenny and the Limitless Team