Project

Empowering Rural Children with 21st century skills

Thematic Area: 21^st Century Skills

Project Background

This project aims to complement existing pedagogical approaches in rural and semi-urban schools in India with the critical 21st-century skills, competencies and character qualities that are often left unaddressed while also addressing some country’s unique educational challenges in such schools, such as those related to inadequately trained, technology-savvy teachers and insufficient financial resources and technology infrastructure.

Objectives of Project

1. To initiate children in the four core 21st century skills Critical Thinking, Communication, Collaboration, and Creativity for life-long learning and living.
2. To extend on existing operational rural programs by Amrita by using already deployed resources and personnel.
3. To deliver group-based collaborative workshops in Internet Technologies, Mobile Apps, Multimedia, and Maker for hands-on tinkering.
4. To deliver integrated Modules in Life Skills Safety, Social Issues, and Cultural Values along with workshops.
5. To deliver personalized online courses in vernacular languages for children based on concepts taught in workshops
6. To conduct three hands-on workshops around four days each for 14 days in 5 Hindi-speaking villages.
7. To sustain the initial workshops with online personalized learning for lifelong learning.
8. To identify more workshops and courses in the future that train 21st century skills to children and deliver them through our online personalized learning platform.
9. To develop a community around the empowerment of children in the core 21^st century skills with stakeholders from villages, academia, and government.

Project Outcomes

• Equip children with advanced computational skills and internet skills.
• Build confidence in children to empathize, ideate, design, and build digital artifacts
• Improve student learning outcomes wherein the children will be able to
• Investigate socio-cultural and environmental problems in their communities
• Map wicked issues to sustainable development goals
• Demonstrate increased computational and scientific literacy
• Initiate children into research on participatory asset mapping
• Demonstrate 21st century skills by applying 4Cs to social problem solving
• Appreciate the use for technology such as multimedia adoption, internet technology in real-life problem-solving.
• Initiate children into Self Learning.
• Provide cultural and value education, SDG education, and education on environmental stewardship and workshops to promote cultural sensitivity and ethical constructionism with technology.

The project was launched in an online ceremony via Teams by Dr. Sujit Banerjee, Director, DST, along with Prof. Bhavani Rao and Prof. Kamal Bijlani from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham on October 30, 2020.

Project Deliverables
The following workshops to be conducted :

Responsive Web Design and Development ( Laptop/ Desktop required)
Provide basic CSS and HTML knowledge to design, develop and launch a website of their own. The target group is from Class 8-10.
See more details about this workshop here.

Developing Safe Spaces to Successfully Navigate Social Media (only Mobile required)
The workshop aims to mentor school children to build safe spaces by creating level one social media competencies and an understanding of the concepts of Social Emotional Learning. The target audience for this workshop is 25 students from Class 8-10.
See more information about this workshop here.

Interactive Media of 21st Century (only Mobile required)
Help students explore and analyze available free applications, impart knowledge of photography and videography animation skills to create videos, and use them for creating Youtube channels. Also, to get hands-on experience with the latest technologies in multimedia such as Virtual reality. The target audience for this workshop is from Class 8-12.
See more information about this workshop here.

Project Scope
This project aims to train 200 rural school students via face-to-face training in 3 identified villages of India through 14-day workshops. Over 70 school students from each village school will be selected. Each workshop will focus on 25 students. The target areas of operation are school children of these 3 Hindi-speaking villages, Chhattisgarh, Meghalaya, and Himachal Pradesh. The selected areas of operation have good infrastructure.

Methodology:
Due to the Covid pandemic, we started our project by conducting the TTT (Train The Trainer) method. We trained teachers through online sessions, and these teachers conducted workshops for students at their respective schools.
Apart from this, we are conducting In-person workshops in Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, and Meghalaya, as stated in our original project scope.

Milestones:

Total 7 online TTT sessions conducted, Teachers from Kerala, Gujrat, Maharashtra, Odisha & Tamilnadu participated.

Total 50 Teachers are trained

Total 239 Students are trained through In-person & TTT

Quantitative Analysis Findings
100% the teachers stated that the workshop offering would be useful and relevant for their students.

88% of teachers felt that they were almost always encouraged to and able to share their opinion freely throughout the workshop.

50% teachers found the time allocated for hands-on training and live practice sessions almost always to be enough. Some teachers felt a slight extension in the workshop hours might help.

Workshop Outputs:
Responsive Web Design & Development:

Developing Safe Spaces to Successfully Navigate Social Media:

Interactive Media of 21st Century:

Project Status: Past/Completed Project

Project Areas: 21st Century Skills

Project Tags: Youth, eLearning Courses

Project Reports

• Workshop Summary, December 2021
• Bijapur (Chhatissgarh), December 2021
• Final Report

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