Reachingout to schools

After running the outreach lectures for nearly 2 years, we realized that we were not reaching out to students who are either from a rural background or come from the underprivileged sections of our society. To have a more inclusive outreach programme, we have recently visited some schools in underprivileged areas in Pune to understand how we can spread the fun of doing science to these children. The challenges in exciting children in such schools appears to be very different compared to what we face when doing talks at NCL. Specifically, the average level of awareness and enthusiasm from the side of the students is considerably lower.  Given this, we have decided to develop a new programme with the same philosophy as the NCL Outreach lectures – viz. to use experiments, demos, etc. to excite children about science.  However, the key difference is that we will choose topics from those that they are taught (through discussions with the schools) – and will develop modules with appropriate experiments and historical background that will help them make connections with the science.  We plan to expand our outreach activities starting June 2010.

We have identified 3 schools to implement the next phase of the Outreach programme:

• Jawahar Navodaya, Shikrapur, Pune District

These is a school in a rural area, and is part of a central government mission to provide quality education to talented children in rural areas.  Education in Navodaya Vidyalayas is free of cost.  A total of 75% of seats are reserved for rural children and a minimum of 33% of seats are reserved for girls.

• Hutatma Balveer ShirishKumar Vidyalay, Pune

This school run by Pune Municipal Corporation and is located opposite Modern College in Shivajinagar.

• Valley View School, Kondhwa

This is a private English medium school for low income groups.  However, the students are not very proficient in the language.  The advantage with this school is that the principal is very enthusiastic about this initiative and she assures up full support for running this program.  Further, the Teach for India fellow (Daniel Lobo) has agreed to be a local resource for the students.

We have currently identified 5 speakers from NCL who have committed to participating in this exercise.  Each speaker will deliver a module to a school (viz. modules will be once a month) starting in the new school year (June 2010).  The NCL scientist speakers for this series are:

• Dr. K. Guruswamy (PhD, Caltech)
• Dr. Kumar Vanka (PhD, U. Calgary)
• Dr. Nandini Devi (PhD, IIT Madras)
• Dr. Sayam Sen Gupta (PhD, Carnegie Mellon)
• Dr. Sourav Pal (PhD, IACS, Kolkata; Bhatnagar Awardee; FNA; FNSc, FASc)

See the next page for more updates.