Out-of-the-box ideas make learning fun

200 Govt schools in Delhi enlisted the help of the animated character Pokemon to make lessons more fun, reportsChetan Chauhan.

Published on: Oct 26, 2006, 24:32:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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With boring teachers making no headway with students, 200 government schools in Delhi enlisted the help of the animated character Pokemon to make lessons more fun. The idea worked like a charm and will soon be extended to another 300 schools.

“It helps students understand lessons better as they relate more easily to Pokemon than to other book characters,” says Siksha Sangam, a compilation of unique learning models. Since Pokemon won’t work with older students, the State Council for Education Research and Training is developing a similar programme for higher classes.

Innovation, it seems, is the way to go. Conventional teaching methods are giving way to creative ideas and, according to an analysis on innovations in teaching under the Sarva Siksha Abhiyan (SSA), working wonders when applied properly.

In Andhra Pradesh’s East Godavari district, children from 170 deprived families call a boat their school. Since their parents live on boats too, normal schools were too far for them. So, “providing schools close to their homes” was the best bet of giving them an education, the compilation says.

In West Bengal, many madrasas are now imparting both religious and conventional education. Books on other subjects are translated in Arabic to help the students understand them. Teachers have been given specialised training under SSA for the new modules.

In Gujarat, girl students are being used as tools to educate their mothers, with the help of SSA volunteers. In Haryana, the government has given bicycles to 21,000 girls so that they get to school. These are just a few of the examples listed in the compilation.

“We want to study new innovations in learning and see if they can be implemented in other parts of the country. Maybe, the answer to a particular problem in a school in Assam lies in an innovative method adopted in Kerala,” a senior official said.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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