Tarun is a grade 6 curious kid ever smiling. He lives with his mother and paternal uncle and studies in a Gujarati medium school in the community in Ahmedabad of cattle rearers mostly. Sadly, the system of education focuses mostly on rote learning of facts, failing to quench the thirst Tarun has for learning of Tarun. He ends up tired with the monotonous schedule of each day at school where every teacher walk-in, asks him and his peers to open the books, read a paragraph, explain the paragraph even when he has understood it and dictates the answers to the questions in the book. He fails to think what can he do about this challenge and goes with the herd without taking an action.

As we have grown up, in cars, ambassadors have grown out and dusters have come in, tring tring of phones have faded out to the hello tunes. Roads, buildings and even the nature of work has evolved a lot. In classrooms, the stories have changed, the books have changed, benches have changed, and boards have changed. However, the education system is more or less stagnant. Still, we are developing people for those roles during the English revolutions.

Our jobs and business are continuous evolving which needs people to empathize with conditions around, critically thinking, create, collaborate and communicate. We have moved a step ahead from the world where knowledge of content was the priority. In the current world, identifying a need, learning quickly a new content, packaging a product as per needs and sharing it around the world is gaining focus.

There are 80+ million children in the schools in India. We are robbing our kids from their future by not introducing and helping them to master the relevant skills.

However, there is hope! Educators, parents and other stakeholders are realizing the need of exposing children to these skills and there is a new dawn in the education system. There are many initiatives popping up encouraging kids to learn STEAM and develop 21^st century skills. Out of many such initiatives, CEL Kids Hackathon, a collaborative coding competition for kids in grades 5-9, is an initiative encouraging kids to code, create and solve problems to achieve the UNs Sustainable Development Goals. CEL Kids Hackathon, is organized by Code to Enhance Learning (CEL), a non profit with a vision that kids code to express and problem solve.

Tarun and his partner Nirav are pitching their application in front of the Vice President and staff of K7 Computing, educators, children and parents during the Felicitation Event of CEl Kids Hackathon 2019 in Head office of K7 Computing in Chennai

Tarun sharing his codes with his peers in one of the coding sessions in his school.

Tarun letting other young kids have fun with his mobile application to play games and rhymes he made in CEL Kids Hackathon 2019

Tarun who was getting attuned to the stagnant system found CEL Kids Hackathon an opportunity to express his frustration with the monotonous schedule by working on SDG 4 quality education. He exercised his creative abilities by making an application which can in fun way teach kids to sing rhymes, learn phonics, mathematical operations, sight words, etc. Besides the application, the crucial experience was to go through the process of learning codes, imagining a solution, collaborating with friends and working crazy to build his first application.

It would be hard to guess on which journey he will go ahead in his life. But one thing is for sure is that this experience has built in him confidence to empathize with conditions, learn and create using technology and collaborate and persevere.

Isn’t STEAM all about such story of change to create a better world?

– Irfan Lalani

Irfan is a Teach for India alum and founder of Code to Enhance Learning. He has Bachelors in Engineering and has worked for a MNC before. However, his heart lies in school challenging the status of current education system. In CEL Kids Hackathon 2019, 1157 children from 56 schools in 16 cities created 600+ projects on UN Sustainable Development Goals to showcase their coding talent. The registrations for CEL Kids Hackathon 2020 will open soon in November 2019. Click here to know more.