As part of our journey to instil interest and excitement for new-age digital technologies among children, Curiosity Gym recently joined hands with Smart Village Movement (SVM) to educate rural kids residing in villages of Meghalaya.
Curiosity Gym, a leading Edtech company in India, is participating in this movement to empower young children and introduce them to the exciting world of digital technologies. The programme is being implemented with the setting up of two Innovation Hubs at the community centre at Sohrarim and Sunei villages, located in the district of East Khasi Hills. The objective is to build curious mind-sets and drive innovation. This collaboration has witnessed good enthusiasm among children as well as authorities.
The engagement started with Prathmesh, an education outreach manager and Innovation Hub trainer from Curiosity Gym, connecting with Richborn, who is the trainer appointed by SVM to teach children at the Sohrari innovation hub. Through virtual training sessions, Prathmesh imparted conceptual understanding and practical uses of various technologies to Richborn. This training was facilitated by use of Curiosity Gym’s novel teachers’ training platform CLIP (curriculum-aligned learning and innovation platform).
The detailed instructions and resources embedded in the platform were instrumental in covering complex topics such as robotics, coding, programming, 3D printing techniques and use of scientific as well as electronic devices. Prathmesh also provided guidance to equip the lab with relevant scientific equipment and instruments, along with their usage. This provided an opportunity to Richborn to delve deep into unique features and uses of these devices and build constructive understanding to further
educate children with appropriate information. Over the period of two months, Prathmesh maintained consistent rapport with Richborn to nurture his motivation towards eventual education goals.
A milestone in this success journey was Prathmesh’s 5-day-visit to Sohrarim and Sunei. During this visit, Prathmesh conducted sessions with village children, which opened a new window of curiosity stimulating techniques for Richborn. These sessions provided children to learn 3D printing technology with the use of a 3D printer and 3D doodler pen. This sparked excitement among the children who participated by asking varied kinds of questions. Alongside, Prathmesh advised Richborn on useful classroom management techniques such as session planning, splitting children into groups as per
age, safe use of equipment and instruments, and safety guidelines for lab functioning. To augment the efforts, Curiosity Gym has built special ‘technology gadget kits’ that include controllers, I/O devices, small motors, and robots, to display how and why knowledge of new-age technologies is critical for children. The special kits are being used by SVM volunteers to extend outreach to other schools in the vicinity and convince their authorities to join this movement.
In a modest way, this movement is paving the way to open a plethora of exciting new-age technologies to children, who are barely connected with the technical world and hail from a community that largely dwells on forest related occupation. It has been a gratifying experience to help catalyse curiosity-led enthusiasm in different technologies that are now rapidly pervading the world, and reduce the digital divide felt by these communities.
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