Narayan Seva Sansthan – a non-profit trust headquartered in Udaipur, Rajasthan – has joined hands with Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay’s social body, Abhyuday, to offer a practical learning experience for underprivileged students.
As part of the partnership, volunteers from IIT Bombay have been conducting virtual classes for students of NSS School and its orphanages over the weekends for the past two-three weeks.
Christened ‘e-Masti Ki Pathsala’, these weekend classes have the volunteers sharing knowledge through an experiential learning pattern, so that the underprivileged students attending the sessions get some much-needed practical learning exposure.
In a typical hour-long class conducted by the IIT Bombay volunteers, students learn through modern teaching tools like brain teasers, puzzles, fun science quizzes and science experiments, followed by a question and answer session. The ‘e-Masti ki Pathsala’ has accommodated around 40-60 students.
Elaborating on the joint enterprise, Narayan Seva Sansthan president Prashant Agarwal said, “This is an exciting initiative for us. We believe out-of-the-box learning and analytical learning abilities can be enhanced through experiential learnings alone. It is important to incorporate conceptual and experiential learning together as this would improvise the learning ability of a child.”
Agarwal added, “Activity-based learning helps the student to focus and understand things conceptually and not just theoretically. We are delighted that we have students from IIT Bombay willing to teach children who will become a part of a bright talent pool of the new age India.”
Subhash Choudhary, campaign manager of Abhyuday, IIT Bombay, said, “It was fun to interact with such amazing and talented kids. The children were quick to catch up on what we taught and seeing their interest in learning new things, I can say all of them will do great in their lives. All the best for their bright future.”
Abhyuday – formed in 2014 by a group of socially inclined students from IIT Bombay – primarily provides opportunities to students of the institute who wish to work for a better society. Within a span of four years since its inception, Abhyuday managed to establish itself as one of the country’s largest student-run social bodies. Apart from running campaigns, it also conducts conferences, exhibitions and donation drives.