If you have been following my blog, you know I have been in the exploration mode for the last few years. Be it attending farming, Jeevan Vidya, Mud House Building Workshops, Art of Hosting training, understanding how Nature, Culture & Economy come together; doing Diploma in Experiential Education, trying out homeschooling for kids and living in a village for some time, organizing a summer camp of urban & rural kids. Recently I also joined a course on Philosophy called Marga from New Acropolis.
Wow!! What all I have done? Crazy stuff!!!
But why? I have kept telling that I am looking for what I should be doing for the next 10-15 years, until I started looking into the deeper meaning of the word “Swadharma“. According to my understanding so far – the world/cosmos has an order, which is Dharma; and finding one’s role according to it is “Swadharma“. With my “Swadharma“, I am not here to change anything but to prepare the ground for the future.
With the above understanding, I have currently narrowed down to work in the field of Education, Children & AI. It was triggered after I saw the announcement that the CBSE is mandating Computational Thinking & AI from Grade 3 onwards. I had put down some of my thoughts in two posts earlier – “Are Indian Parents & Teachers ready for the AI Wave?” & “Parenting & Learning in the AI World“.
To take it forward, I decided to work on the project called learnct.ai to connect everyday life to Computational Thinking. Apart from activities which are built from scratch, it currently maps different activities of NCERT books from Grades 3-8, with the Computational Thinking skills like Decomposition, Abstraction, Data Analysis, Pattern Recognition, Algorithmic Thinking & Troubleshooting listed by CBSE. For Grades 3 to 5 I have taken “The World Around Us” books and for Grades 6 to 8, I have taken “Kaushal Bodh” & “Art books – Kriti“. For interdisciplinary projects for 6-8, I have taken other subjects like Mathematics, Science, Social Science as well.
Though in the CBSE circular, it is mentioned that Computational Thinking (CT) can be taught through Mathematics and The World Around Us (TWAU) books, but it has published students’ and teachers’ workbooks only aligned with mathematics books. In my opinion, that would become the mainstream and may lose its purpose. There is a lot happening in our daily life and thankfully it is very well captured in the TWAU books, so why not take advantage of it. It would be easier for teachers and students to relate to, and they would build real life skills.
The learnct.ai platform offers more than just tagged activities. For each activity there would be a set of questions which a teacher can ask, based on Kolb’s Learning Cycle, to bring a student closer to becoming a Self Directed Learner (a student who knows how to learn). This is one skillset which students or anyone would require as more and more AI adoption happens in coming years. There would also be a facilitator’s tip for each activity to help the teachers run the activity more effectively.
I plan to keep all activities open to all; anyone can explore, print and then run the activities. There are options to upload new activities from anyone, which can then again become available to all. Though I plan to offer paid training to schools or teachers on facilitation and AI skills.
Do check out the learnct.ai platform and share among your circle. Feel free to reach out if you would like to collaborate, give suggestions/comments or just casually want to discuss the topic.
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