November 2022

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 27 nov 2022

In a panel discussion in TechSparks 2022 titled 'STEM Education: Key to a future-ready India' experts talked about the importance of experiential learning, particularly in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) subjects, for India to have a sustainable and future-ready workforce. Amit Chatterjee, Startup Program and Strategic Business Initiatives at Intel India, says, 'We have more than 1.4 lakh schools in the country...National Education Policy 2020, which says we need to be more activity-oriented, have more experiential and practical-oriented education. And what we want to do today is to have the conversation on how exactly we can enable that.' Harish Rawlani, Co-founder and Director of MakerInMe Technologies, says, '...How to create something which will allow students to learn technology - is one of the key challenges when it comes to the technology aspect of STEM education. We have to abstract out technology so that students can learn and find it engaging.' Manila Carvalho, Principal of Delhi Public School(Bangalore East), says, 'In schools across rural and urban areas, most of us [teachers] do not belong to the digital era. We are learning and we are trying, but the pace in which we are doing it is very slow compared to the children who are in the school. So they definitely require support — maybe external support if teachers are not equipped enough...Teachers need to be trained for whatever changes, whatever new things we will bring to the schools. If they are convinced, the product will work well...' Pooja Goyal, Co-founder and COO of Avishkaar, says, 'The customer acquisition cost is so high, that you end up raising lots of money from venture capital...I think in education, you do need a little bit of patience to build a solid business over a period of time. And the current model of funding is not completely attuned to that pace at which it needs to be built...Children must learn important skills like tech literacy and problem solving skills...So for some of these skills, it is more about teaching computational thinking skills, the vocabulary, how it is applicable to solutions, building real solutions, and that's a very challenging job.' Read on...

YourStory: Why India needs to focus on STEM education and creative learning methods
Author: Christopher Isaac

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