July 19, 2024

As part of our robotics outreach program, we've begun a series of workshops to raise STEM awareness and education throughout India. Our third location was the Kendriya Vidyalaya Air Force School, located in the city of Bareilly in Uttar Pradesh, a few hours east of Delhi. Most of the students attending this school are the children or relatives of members of India's Air Force, and tend to move around quite often, making their educational journey incoherent. 

To tackle this issue, as well as the tendency of the Indian education system to push students away from hands-on experiments, we led a workshop targeting the need to inspire a drive for experiential learning in communities like these. 

We spent the morning touring the school, meeting teachers and students alike from many different backgrounds. We met with young students, and even teachers who told us, mostly in Hindi, that they loved robots and building things, though many still didn't fully grasp the applications of robotics.

We then went on to run our workshop, which was run in place of a newly adopted Python course that the school has implemented for the purposes of STEM Advocacy, similar to the R4E cause. Many students spoke keenly of Artificial Intelligence, and were curious to learn about its conception and use. We improvised a short lesson diving into AI.

We went on to explain the fundamentals of robotics, and give students an idea of why robotics was so important to modern life, in terms of all the newly available resources through the field. We introduced the need for experimentation, showing the audience of around seventy students a demonstration of how Arduino and stepper motors could be utilized with something as simple as a piece of cardboard to form a robot, and elaborated on the mathematical and scientific educational uses.

By the end of the session, many students opened up and began asking questions eagerly, including requests to learn to begin coding and building. One particularly aspiring student approached us with his dreams for a future of transportation where the amount of gasoline released could be significantly downplayed through a new take on the hybrid vehicles we see today. 

We're excited to see where these experiments will take the students, and how robotics and STEM may be able to change their lives, inside and outside the classroom. We're looking forward to the rest of the India workshops, as well as our workshops across the U.S. and the world, and hope that STEM education can reach kids in the way it did at KV AFS.