IIT Gandhinagar, UP Govt launch 'curiosity' programme to help girl students in STEM

NEW DELHI: The Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar’s (IITGN) Centre for Creative Learning (CCL) is collaborating with the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) of the Uttar Pradesh (UP) government to launch a programme called “curiosity”, for 746 Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya (KGBV) schools in Uttar Pradesh to encourage girl students to pursue a career in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields.

According to a statement from IIT Gandhinagar, the curiosity programme aims to reach around 74,600 girl students across UP. The objective of the programme is to improve science education in schools beyond textbooks and school curriculum. The programme also intends to include other streams apart from the STEM subjects in the long run.

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Under the programme, IITGN CCL will develop about 100 modules to update the STEM education provided in middle school science by using interesting toys and conducting various activities. As part of the programme, online and offline workshops will be conducted in these selected schools. Apart from this, a “curiosity box” which contains materials to conduct activities will be provided to these schools so that teachers can carry out these activities with ease. The modules are made available in the Hindi language and will be provided to schools all through the year, claims IIT Gandhinagar.

About 100 girl students of Classes 6 to 8 from each of the KGBV schools are already attending the CCL-IITGN online tutorial workshops using Zoom and YouTube accompanied by teachers, it said.

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“This programme is specially designed keeping in mind the environment that these girl students come from. The context, examples, stories, material, and the use of Hindi language, everything is specially created so that they can relate to it while learning. Such contextual content is largely missing in the content available on the internet. We aim to bring back the “gleam” in the eyes of all the 74,600 girls with whom we are going to connect through about 100 sessions planned from March to December 2022,” said Manish Jain, head of CCL, IIT Gandhinagar.