The Indian education system is not particularly known for its hands on learning methods. The education culture still lauds rote learning and book based learning methods. One social enterprise is thinking about learning methods a bit differently. Hyderabad based Butterfly Fields recently won the case study competition themed “Democratizing Innovation: A Game Changer for Inclusive Growth” as a part of the 3rd Global Innovation Conference held by the All India Management Association.

Image courtesy 'The Hindu'

Butterfly fields is one such organization that looks into education with a lens of design thinking. They design innovative curriculum’s, hands-on activities and propagate conceptual teaching practices. They strongly believe that a person’s career choice should be based on their passions and interests and not on what the existing school structure tends to provide. Their motto is learning by doing. The idea is to make children think laterally in a supportive, neutral environment where every child can learn what they are good at. This start-up was started by alumni from prestigious schools like IIT, IIM and NID.

For now, the ways to decimate this kind of education is through summer science camps and is tied to around 25 schools and has reached over 15,000 children. They would also like to tie up with schools for round the year school workshops and then slowly try and integrate their practices into school curriculums. Along with hands on workshops, Butterfly field has other offerings like concept maps, math & science games, curriculum based content development, teacher training, mini science center, e-learning tools and more.

Non traditional schooling practices are becoming more widespread in India and other Asian countries. Focus on problem solving and design thinking is growing so as to create next generation thought leaders. The idea is to create an economy that does not dependent on cheap services for developed nations, but can create innovative companies and services for future growth and prosperity. And it all starts with good education.

Other sources
Times of India Article on Butterfly Fields
The Hindu Article on Butterfly Fields

If you travel on the streets of Mumbai, you will stumble upon street kids who go about begging to earn a living. These kids are young, enthusiastic, curious, bold and have learned to deal with adversity the hard way. One thing that really motivates these kids is Bollywood. Kanan Shah, a Pratt Institute graduate, is someone who loves to design and dance. She is also a big fan of Bollywood. Born and raised in Mumbai, one thing that has always been on her mind is -  Can anything be done to help street kids in the city?  She wants to use her talent in visual and performing arts and Bollywood as a medium to improve the lives of these children.

Kanan took up a project – “Between the Green Lights” as her Masters thesis topic. In this project, she created a documentary to showcase the talent these kids possess and the passion they have for Bollywood. All the kids want to be the next Shahrukh Khan or Abhishekh Bachchan. Kanan wants to use Bollywood and art as a medium to provide the kids with a basic education (basic Math, English, Dancing, Singing, Acting) so that they have a chance to live their dreams.

Her vision is to eventually create a performing arts school only for the underprivileged children of Mumbai. This institution will give the children the opportunity to specialize in one particular area of performing art based on their interest. Some of the specialization areas could be filmography, professional dancing and dialogue writing. Similar to other art schools, they will also be taught the history behind the area they choose. For example, if someone were to choose professional dancing as their line of interest, they would also learn the history of dancing, the basic principles of movement, the greatest dancers of all times and so on. Therefore, combining studio classes with theory, these kids will be given a comprehensive education.

Kanan wants to reach out to various Bollywood stars (like Jackie Shroff, who himself once lived on the streets) and ask them to help promote this vision that could end up being a non-profit organization focusing on providing the less fortunate children of India a better future. This way they will realize that not everyone can become a star and being a star is not easy. But who knows, a few of them might actually become the next Bollywood superstar! This might be a small step in providing a brighter future for our country’s next generation.

Featured image on the homepage by Louis Vest

Arnab Basu | Game Designer from shagun singh on Vimeo.

Arnab Basu is a product manager at IMVU–a Palo Alto start-up leveraging 3D avatar technology to maintain an online community of over fifty million members. He has worked in production and operations on platinum-selling video games, like Batman: Arkham Asylum and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. And he conceived and led development on MTV’s mtvU GameORZ, an online portal for college students to showcase original flash games. Arnab has presented at the Game Developers Conference and at the Vancouver Film School. And he managed studio operations at SilverTree Media, a boutique video game developer with a focus on children. He has an avid interest in enhancing primary education for kids around the world by harnessing new media and game design techniques to build flexible, on-demand learning ecologies.

In this Skype chat, Arnab talks about how games are embedded in our lives. A lot of games are based around human behaviors like collecting objects or organizing things. However, games can also be used to define and introduce certain behaviors and this aspect can be used to make socially responsible and educational games. Arnab is on the board of directors of Institute of Play.

Proposal for game design for rural education system -

After doing a thorough research on how education system of primary schools gets implemented in rural areas of the state, I found out many opportunities to intervene and design games to teach student differently and interestingly.

Key insights-
1. Need of a resource other than book, for teaching children basics of each subject.
2.Children should not feel burden of schooling. Learning can happen parallely with playing.
3. In a small village, children remain in school for more than 10 hrs. ( because many times their parents go for working in fields and children don’t have anything to do at home). Except school timing they play in court yard.

Game -
Player has to hit marble on every planet with his own marble using his traditional marble playing skills. Starting the journey from the Neptune one has to land on the Earth.
1. Collect points by hitting planets. Large planet you hit, more points you earn E.g. – Jupiter has the highest point in the tally and mercury has the lowest point in the
tally because of their relative sizes.
2. When you come hitting planets in descending order from Neptune to mars, you have change your path and hit mercury then sun and then Venus. At last you land on
earth.
3. If you miss any hit, turn goes to other participant. You can start from same planet next time.
4. Sun is the hottest star and Venus is the hottest planet in the planetary system. So after you get mercury, you have to get sun and Venus one after another as you can not survive on the Sun and the Venus.
5. Player who lands on earth first wins the game. Second, third numbers will be drawn on the basis of collected points

Numerous game plays are possible-
Teacher can change the game play after few weeks of playing and introduce children with some new one.
Teacher can teach children about the planet using the game as a
tool.

Game will be distributed by education board in rural area primary schools where the number of students are not more than 80. ‘School co-ordinator of the area’ will distribute the game in each school. He will guide teachers about rules of the game and hand over him the product which is consist of -
1. main game
2. charts.
3. small slate or black board.

Then for first 3-4 times teacher has to act as a facilitator. Afterwards children can play the game without any monitoring.

In simple words, Synthetic Biology is about making living organisms do things which nature had not intended on them doing. Its about taking tiny bits of DNA, splicing them together and inserting them into bacteria. In effect, a bacterium could be made to change colour or made to be bright enough to be visible to the naked eye. In Yashas Shetty’s words, Artist and faculty member at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology as well as Artist-in-Residence at NCBS – National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) – “this mixing and matching of elements to create new things was a bit like what artists did. But instead of using paints and canvas, synthetic biologists used life itself.”

This thoughtful insight by Yashas Shetty led him to mentor a bunch of art& design students – who knew very little, if anything about science to participate in the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) held at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) last year. One of the aims of the competition is to attempt to build simple biological systems from standard, interchangeable parts and operate them in living cells.

The iGEM competition facilitates this by providing a library of standardized parts (called BioBrick standard biological parts) to students, and asking them to design and build genetic machines with them. Student teams can also submit their own BioBricks. Successful projects produce cells that exhibit new and unusual properties by engineering sets of multiple genes together with mechanisms to regulate their expression.

Information about BioBrick standard biological parts, and a toolkit to make and manipulate them, is provided by the Registry of Standard Biological Parts, or simply, the Registry. This is a core resource for the iGEM program, and one that has been evolving rapidly to meet the needs of the program. Beyond just building biological systems, broader goals of iGEM include:

• To enable the systematic engineering of biology.
• To promote the open and transparent development of tools for engineering biology.
• To help construct a society that can productively apply biological technology.

As per the rules of the competition, MIT sends all participants 400 bits of DNA. They are all numbered. One cant go to a database of parts on the web and find out which DNA makes what and then make your organism in the laboratory using the DNA bits.

NCBS had been sending students for MIT’s iGem competition for the last couple of years. Last year they decided to send art students – who knew nothing about science – to participate instead. They were called the ArtScience Team from Bangalore. And, unlike scientists, the artists came up with a project which only artists could have thought of: they were going to replicate the smell of first rain in a laboratory— that odour when pure water from the skies mixes with soil.” The English word for the smell is Petrichor, a non-lyrical name for a phenomenon that is so emotive. The primary cause behind the smell, however, has a slightly more lyrical name: Geosmin, an organic chemical.

The students did the scientific parts in the laboratory of NCBS. At the end of it, Shetty says, the experiment didn’t turn out the smell of first rain. Instead there was this smell of dampness.

But it was enough.

They won the third prize for science. The presentation, in which they explained how a group of art students became scientists for a season, got them a special prize for best presentation. “They said that they started off as artists and are now talking to scientists. I think that impressed the judges,” says Mukund Thattai of NCBS, whose laboratory the art students had used for this experiment. The ArtScience Team took synthetic biology to new groups, running workshops to teach designers to build working DIY microscopes using webcams and ran creative workshops at a school for the urban poor. This idea of “human practices” – that is, exploring the ethical and social implications of the technology – was a new focus of last year. What made this team stand out from the rest was the fact that they looked at the field from a beginners perspective and climbed their way up to the knowledge filed and shared it with anyone who was interested. While the other teams were focusing on a problem-solution approach they were more interested in making the knowledge that iGEM was distributing as accessible and open source as possible. Their process- start to finish, complete with drawings was documented in a handbook that was printed at distributed at the competition. It’s no surprise that they ran out of copies. The handbook is available for free download at – http://hackteria.org/wiki/images/a/a1/Handbook.pdf

When I asked Neha Bhatt, member of the ArtScience team – about her first hand experience with synthetic biology and its processes, she said “ it was a real eye –opener. For me, the competition’s process opened up a whole new area I’d never known existed. The field of artists doing science and the boundaries b/w art and science being traversed.”

Apart from being instrumental in changing people’s perspective towards synthetic biology, the participation of students of art+design in an otherwise science competition, threw open many discussions; primarily that was access. Should Science as a field and practice remain inclusive or should it open its doors to creative practioners as well; to explore and create? There were those purists, of course, who simply did not take them seriously, for they believed that artist’s are those who draw the bio diagrams; and the main question that they were faced with was – ” So if  you guys being beginners can be given the authority to play around with real life, can anyone looking to harm society also not to do the same?”

They’re answer was simply that their project was an experiment to these questions.

Team ArtScience 2010 is all set to make another appearance at this year’s IGEM. Here’s wishing them all the best and one hopes that more such lines between seemingly disparate disciplines get blurred, norms get challenged, more knowledge gets shared and that perceptions are constantly altered.

The iGEM 2010 site –

http://2010.igem.org/Main_Page

The wiki of Team ArtScience Bangalore -

http://2009.igem.org/Team:ArtScienceBangalore

Most people in the US of A, may have already heard about the Uniform Project. But for those few who still don’t know, here is a quick update. Uniform Project is the brain child of this quirky, fun and fabulous girl called Sheena Matheiken from Brooklyn, NY. She was born and raised in South India and like most desis in the US, came here to study and then work. Her concept for the Uniform Project is simple. She has decided to wear one dress for a whole year as an exercise in sustainable fashion.

She has 7 pieces of the same black dress designed by her friend and fashion designer Eliza Starbuck, one for each day of the week [incase you were wondering when she does her laundry]. But she wears them in different ways everyday. Every day she reinvents the dress with layers, accessories and all kinds of accouterments, the majority of which are vintage, hand-made, or hand-me-down goodies either donated or bought on ebay. The point of this entire year long exercise is to raise funds for a charity called Akanksha Foundation, a grassroots non-profit founded in Mumbai in 1990 through the volunteered efforts of college students devoted to bringing education to children living in the slums.

She is on her 270^th day today and has already risen over $53,000 in funds. And you can check out her daily outfit updates and make a donation at

http://theuniformproject.com/home/daily/Transverse-planes.html?month=January

Part of this entire adventure which I am sure Sheena had intended was to raise awareness about education of underprivileged children in India. And using design and sustainability to do it, worked perfectly well in the whole realm of “doing the right thing”. But the idea is so fabulous that the awareness has spread wide and how? Interview with BBC, appearance at the London Fashion week, fund raisers in Ireland, New York and now our very own Mumbai, India.

A week ago Sheena was in India, traveling to check out Akanksha projects, meet the children in person, and she where her project funds are actually going to be used. The trip turned out to be an opportunity for Vogue India, Bungalow 8 and Akansha to collaborate with Sheena on yet another fundraiser to help the cause. And what is amazing about this fundraiser is that it is still in tandem with the entire concept of Sustainable Design.

Six of India’s cool fashion designers took on the challenge to convert old saris into fabulous new modern-day wear, accessories and footwear. I mean how cool is it to have zardozi on your ballet slippers? All the proceeds from the sales at the event go to Akanksha’s cause. The designers included Little Shilpa, Miriam Sterhlau, Dadablui, Xylem, Sanchita and the amazing Indian couture guru, James Ferreira. I really wish I were visiting Bombay soon to check out the goodies and instantly add them to my wardrobe. What better way to get some retail therapy than at the cost of good karma?

For more information on the Uniform Project visit http://www.theuniformproject.com/

The laptop has been developed by Indian Institute of Science (IISc) & Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Chennai. Though technology has been developed by IISc & IIT, laptop will be manufactured in collaboration with a private company. The laptop is expected to be launched in another 6 months (which should be right about now). The prototype was launched by Arjun Singh, human resource developement minister on 3rd of Feb at Tirupati. Human resource developement ministry says this is India’s answer to MITs $100 laptop.

Here is a Times of India Report from Feb 09 just before the prototype was displayed

Barefoot college in Tilonia, Rajasthan, is a system of education that believes in the capability, knowledge and skills of the rural community and trains them further in specialized fields like solar engineering, rain forest harvesting, health and hygiene, wasteland development, and traditional media to name a few.  The education is practical and combines indeginious local methods with specialized engineering techniques to create a system where the students go back to their communities as leaders and experts in specific fields.

Started by a social activist by the name of Sanjit ‘Bunker’ Roy, in the year 1973, the college is designed on simple and practical system of hands on knowledge. The college lays special emphasis on woman and children which are can be seen in the initiatives such as the night school system and the Mahila Samitis.

This is a special place. It learns from the context and people and uses western and local technology to solve problems. It is a place designed for optimum education and maximum returns. This is truly democratic system designed by the people, of the people and for the people. It is successful because of that very reason.