STEM Education for At-Risk Children in India

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