TINKERIN SESSION FOR THE FUTURE TINKERS

 

Mentoring college students on innovative ideas is good but it is spectacular when we teach the school students to innovate and ideate on technical fields. My experience in teaching the girls from Jaigopal Garodia Girls School was magnificent. Atal had given a task for the students to create a drone with an innovative application addressing a social problem. I was assigned from our centre to teach about the drones and to build one. The first session was conducted on 16th September 2019 and the follow up session was on 28th September 2019. Being the first time in the line of teaching, to be honest I was bit nervous. Making presentations and making notes to teach them is usual but to reach the students and to convey them in their language of understanding is different. Initially I struggled to formulate for teaching them thinking that teaching the school going children will be a herculean task. I still remember my first class with them, I called few volunteers and made them stand in the ground and assigned them with the name of the part of a drone. This way the students understood the role of each component in a drone and the working. That was the time when I realized that learning with tasks is what students expect. The next few classes about teaching them how to build a drone, students showed enthusiasm and great interest. I tried to connect to them not by explaining them with high class technical terms but I took the day to day examples to tell them the need and the working of drones. There was lot to take out as experience from the Atal drone teaching sessions to these students. First, the ideas the students gave were simple but had significant solutions for the problems faced by the country like pollution, water scarcity, and traffic and so on and so forth. I was astonished to know that students are more spontaneous than others. They come up with ideas in spur of the moment but with solutions that may have greater impact. Second, students enjoy being creative but they need to have an ethos to support and to incubate their thought process. Third, the initiative taken by MHRD in the form of competition to reach out to students of school having Atal Tinkering Lab is good but it could be even better if they try reaching out to the schools which are remotely located in villages and towns. The sessions can be on teaching them about the new trend which are in an urge to replace the traditional methods. Fourth, Students are more interested in activity based learning than to have just book and pen way. Overall experience in educating them about drones was not just an experience but can be engraved as the best days in the history of my teaching.