Hands-on learning

Yashaswi Raj, a 15-year-old student of Lexington High School in the United States, grew up listening to his father, Dr Govindraju’s struggles during his school days in Mysuru. One such tale was that of his father studying in kerosene lamp light. The family may have settled in the United States now, but has not forgotten its initial struggles. Now, as a fellow of Edgerton Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Raj is bubbling with ideas to contribute to the transformation of the other side of India marked by underprivileged people.

The current system of education places too much focus on marks rather than true learning and this reflects in the quality of students today. Educationist Dr M K Sridhar from Bangalore University agrees, “It is basically due to too much of regimentation. The syllabus, textbooks and question papers have been hampering innovation.” In order to deal with this, the Edgerton Center decided to propagate hands-on learning experience. For this, Yashaswi realised that hands-on training especially for government school kids will have a great impact on their education. Otherwise, elementary teaching will remain as rote learning.

To get started, Yashaswi chose a few educational institutions which provided quality education to the underprivileged students, such as Deenabandhu in Chamarajanagar and a few institutions of Swami Vivekananda Youth Movement (SVYM). He started to demonstrate basic concepts of science and electronics through models. His first demonstration was an LED device resembling the Aurora Borealis lights in Alaska. Both the kids and their teachers witnessed concepts of fundamental electronics like current, voltage, resistance and properties of light becoming playful experiences. He also built a water rocket with plastic soda bottles which demonstrated the relationship between pressure, direction and flight trajectories, thus making science come alive.  

Praveen, joint secretary, SVYM, says, “It was a refreshing change for the students as, for the first time, they had hands-on experience in electronics. Since Yashaswi was of the same age, the students were able to connect to him easily. The students now want more such experiments and the management has already mooted to carry out similar experiments.”

Nisarga, a student, says, “Initially, I could not follow Yashaswi. However, later when he made the experiments so look simple and explained the importance of science and electronics, I got fully involved in it.” Another student, Pooja shares a similar joy, “Electricity is an essential commodity in our daily life. The rainbow effect Yashaswi created in the light bulb made me learn more about science.” Yashaswi’s demonstrations and more such experiments will now be inculcated in Vijnanavahini, a project by SVYM, reaching out to rural school children to offer them means of learning science through a mobile science laboratory. 

Yashaswi’s practical tryst did a world of good even to the people living in far off Barmer in Rajasthan. While on a short trip to the desert land to assist his sister in her project, he saw that the huts in the village were dark or poorly-lit even during the day. Taking cue from a concept developed in Indonesia by a set of students in a similar instance, he suggested the residents create a hole on the roofs of their houses and place a plastic soda bottle with water and bleach in it. The water and bleach in a plastic bottle act as light refractors, thus banishing darkness.

During his talk at the United Nations World Peace Summit in 2014, Yashaswi had shown a kerosene chimney to the delegates, which his father used during school days. He wanted to develop a mechanism to change the lives of the underprivileged students still using chimneys, for good. Two years down the line, the project is more than half done. He is confident that during his visit to India next year, he would distribute the assembled units to deprived students in remote villages.