Homi Bhabha Centre
– Pratap
We attended a conference and also presented a poster at epiSTEME7 conference in HBCSE (Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education) at Mumbai. It was an international conference held from Jan 5th to 8th 2018. Many people from different countries had come and presented their research and review papers at the conference. The conference was about research on Science, TEchnology and Mathematics Education. We wrote a paper on “Fostering Responsibility in Learning in Rural Schools”. Our paper was selected for a poster presentation. Five of us from STEM land – Aura Auro Design Arun, Poovizhi, Pratap, Sanjeev and Sundar went for the conference.
IIT Bombay
On Jan 5th we attended the conference and in the evening we went to IIT Bombay. There we met students from Educational Technology department. We met Prof. Chandan who is with the Educational Technologies group. Two years back the group had interacted with them and we wanted to re-establish a research relationsip with them. Chandan had recently joined the fledging department and had volunteered with Sanjeev with Asha and was interested in our research. We presented our work to the department PhD students and professors. Sanjeev started the presentation with 2 videos of STEM land talking about how we started and then the four of us presented our epiSTEME7 poster to them. We also shared about our research topics which we have been working on. Arun’s research topic is “Deep learning of Mathematics through materials and real life projects”, Sundar’s topic is “Developing leadership via STEMLand” and Poovizhi and my topic is “Altering Factors Influencing Student’s Attitude Towards Thinking Mathematically”.
We got a very positive response about our work and some of the students were interested in helping us refine our research to make it relevant to upcoming conferences.
TISS (Tata Institute of Social Sciences)
On the second day we went to TISS to present our work with some students. There were about 25 students and 4 teachers. They were inspired about what we do. After the presentation students asked many question and we answered those question. Some of the questions were about scaling STEM land. We showed the news letter and got all their email address in order to send a soft copy of the newsletter. Some of the youth wanted to visit STEM land. One of the youth remarked that her entire perspective on education had been rattled and it was still sinking in that children can be responsible for their own learning.
The 3rd day we were in the conference the whole day. Every day they start with a review talk which lasts for about 45 minutes. We had breaks after every 2 – 3 papers were presented. During the break time we interacted with as many participants. During the conversations we exchanged information about what we do and our research. We were the youngest participants in the that conference and rest of them were older than us. One of the participants a dean from South Africa made a video about us to show in her country. We had a buffet system during dinner. We met a person who was making puzzles with binding wire. We all took some puzzles from him for the children in STEM land and his contact and have invited him to visit us a teach us wire art.
Then on the 4th day we attended sessions till the afternoon and Sanjeev also chaired a session.
Later in the evening we again went to TISS this time to present to the professors of the school of Social Work. Their perspectives were very different and probing and it helped us understand our own work differently. When they realized that at Isai Ambalam most of the children we work with are Dalits they were very interested in the relevance of this work to children with difficult backgrounds in homes, institutions and on the street. After the presentation the teachers were willing to help in our research paper especially the surveys. They asked us to create a program package that can be offered to other school teachers as a workshop.
