STORY PREVIEW

2020

Learn And Story Tell - by Changemakers

Lead by Design foundation

Tamilnadu

MENTOR

Anna Maria Geogy Deepika Gopalkrishnan Prabhu Mani

Step 1 FEEL

Our team consist of 10 students from different parts of the country. 6 of us study in government school and 4 of us study in private school. India went into nation wide lockdown in March 2020. We saw that many of our friends are unable to access internet to continue learning. At the same time, we got an opportunity to understand the current reality of education in India through an online hackathon conducted in May 2020. We realised that just like our friends, there are many children in India who shifted from their home back to villages and are not able to access any kind of education. So, we, the team of change makers decided to change this scenario.

We spoke to several teachers and students to understand what is happening with respect to access to education. 2 of the rural teachers that we spoke to were Sameer and Gopal Bhaiya. We understood from Sameer Bhaiya that children from rural India are very good with real life skills including making with hands. Gopal Bhaiya, another educator from rural India told us that young children struggle to learn basic math and science in english language. Due to lockdown, the rural educators did not have access to meet with children directly to teach them. We also realised that parents of the children are illiterate themselves and work for the whole day. We also learnt that children in rural India didn’t have access to phones and mobile networks as well to continue their learning when schools are closed. So we asked, How might we help students from rural parts of India learn scholastic studies without tech access?

School going children, who do not have access to technology were mainly affected by the problem. Their primary concern was how to use the time effectively at home and how to continue to study even if they don't have access to internet or phones.

Step 2 IMAGINE

We came up several ideas to solve this challenge. They were split as 4 categories 1. Paper based- Writing magazines or articles in newspaper, lessons through newspaper and pamphlets and posters. 2. People based Buddy system where children pair up with each other and learn. Teach one where one person in the village learns and teaches others 3. activity based Writing story books with real examples Doing experiments with household material and learning Making games and learning through games 4. Electricity based Broadcast through TV and radio Broadcast through projector Broadcast through loudspeakers Whatsapp messages

Our solution has 4 parts 1. To write story magazines 2. To write the framework on how to write the story magazine and distribute to older children in the villages 3. To invite friends to write 4. To distribute the written story magazine to the local public distribution centre so that young children can come and pick up the magazines. We chose this solution because the solution is cost effective - We need pen, paper and colours to write the story book Easily implemented - Older children in the village can write story books for younger children. Easily replicated - the framework can be translate in many languages. Each village has older children who can write for young children in their preferred language. Easily available - Since the story magazines are distributed through PDC, it will be easily made available for all children. Easily scalable - Our solution is easily scalable to reach many parts of the country with the help of support and minimum funds required. Fun - Reading story books and playing games is fun. Hence young children will enjoy this book. High impact - Our solution impacts both learner and the writer. Both of us receive knowledge. one by reading and one by writing. And most importantly, our solution is for students by students.

Step 3DO

We first sent out emails to many students and teachers and received their feedback and their willingness to be a part of the program. We then spoke in innovation platforms about our project and invited students to be a part of our program. We then gathered together every week and started writing story magazines. We read these story magazines to 3rd grade children (we chose to write stories for 3rd grade children).

We found that third grade children enjoyed the story on fractions that we had written. They understood the story. We got to know about this from the feedback form. We also asked teachers opinion on our story books. Grade 6 teachers read our story book to their children who couldn't understand much English. He found that his students were able to understand our story.

50

"Children love challenges and quiz is a great way to solve complex to simple challenges" - Anna Banerjee, Educator "The framework looks great! Very clear and crisp. Some things that might help are - using an example to illustrate the framework in action" - Sampada, student "The framework is great for its sensibility + simplicity" - Student 2 "Grade level language used" - Educator 2

Since we are now staying in different parts of the country (due to lockdown, some of us had to go back to our native places), stable internet connection was a challenge. We solved this by getting on phone calls and discussing the solutions. Reaching out to more children - Our challenge was to reach out to more children to talk about our ideas. We overcame this challenge by asking permission from our teachers to present our project. We prepared for the presentation and hence it took less time to make children understand. Each of us have online classes at different times and hence we overcame this challenge by working on our project on Saturdays and Sundays.

15-30 Days

Quality Education

Our Solution directly impacts learning of students. Our solution aims to bring quality education to all children irrespective of whether they have mobile phone access. Our solution not only impacts the reader (young children), but also the writer. During the process of writing, we learnt that we have to be clear with our concepts, think of fun ways of explaining and write using simple language. All of these develop our learning as well. Hence our solution has impact for both learner and writer.

Step 4 SHARE

We shared our project through different forums. 1. We asked permission to our class teacher and shared our idea to our classmates. (100 children) 2. We presented in an innovation platform for children and other teachers. (60 people) 3. We wrote emails to people and asked them to share it with other teachers. Some of the responses from the teachers and students are given above.

More than 100

By sharing our project, we have also got other students joining our project to write story books. Today we are 10 more students writing concept related story books. We are currently making a website to spread the our project and invite many of our friends to be a part of the movement. The website will have story magazines, which can be downloaded by anyone. We plan to publish these story magazines and give them to organisations who work with children from rural areas.

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