Within lets my role was two fold:

1. Lets: To work together with the team to facilitate lets’ vision—conducting baseline studies, on-field studies, collaboration with organisations, designing children’s books, facilitating art and storytelling workshops among others. 

2. Dahanu Tales: Creating a product in addition to Lets digital application as part of my Master thesis. A game that uses alphabet specific alliteration to gamify language learning through oral repetition. 

1. G.S.S. Khun: A school in the remote village of Khun in Himachal Pradesh, the location of initial outreach, baseline studies as well as content creation facilitated by storytelling and art workshops.

2. Grammangal, Aina: A school following constructivist based approach in the village of Dahanu near Mumbai. The site for further research, on-field studies, prototype testing and validation.

3. Massachusetts Institute of technology, Tata Centre for technology and design: A visit to MIT for an exchange of ideas, research methodologies and networking

4. Sensibol: Our application development partner, Sensibol helped with qualitative assessment of proficiency with english and creating the Lets app.

5. Agastya Foundation: Agastya has a "Campus Creativity Lab" located on a 172-acre campus in Kuppam, Andhra Pradesh,[4] which houses science and art centers including an astronomy center and planetarium, center for creative teaching, an innovation hub, a science model-making center, the Ramanujan Math Park, an open-air ecology lab and many more. The campus receives over 650 children every day and also trains teachers from seven states in India. I carried out workshops with children. The idea was to facilitate exchange of ideas and methodologies. 

6. Nirman: A youth initiative parented by SEARCH (Society for Education, Action and Research in Community Health) founded in 1986 by Dr. Abhay and Dr. Rani Bang for rural health care and research. At Gadchiroli, Maharashtra I participated in workshops and community outreach that postulated effective and profitable work for the bottom of the pyramid in the field of health. 

7. Shailesh J. Mehta School of Management: Management courses at SJM SOM in order to keep an overview on the economic aspect of design for bottom of the pyramid

1. English as medium: 70% of all content on the internet is in english. With the internet reaching the nooks and corners of India, it becomes the medium through which people with limited access to infrastructure can self-learn. 

2. The need for assistance in English language learning came from the field itself. Educators from G.S.S Khun, Himachal as well as Grammangal , Aina, Dahanu both, felt the need for the language to be taught or engaged with in more effective ways. 

1. Curriculum: The curriculum taught via NCERT books or state board books is not contextualised to the socio-economical and historical culture of the place and is not mindful of its geography. When context and language are both alien the gap between student and language increases. English curriculum has Shakespeare and Wordsworth. Writings by native authors or authors that write about the region. (Lack of relatability with the subject matter) is absent. The content does not address the struggles and concerns of its audience, thus lacking empathy.

2. Teachers : themselves have low confidence and facility with language. They often use the native language to teach English, using a ‘translative approach’. While it helps students to use the structure of the familiar language to peg the new one, it is fraught with several problems. This translative approach is not done with conscious thought given to pedagogy Furthermore languages such as Hindi and English are different in several ways. English is phonemic, meaning that the pronunciation of a word isn’t always the same as the spelling. In spite of the drawbacks of this method it exhibits the “power of the familiar”, allowing students a framework on which they can peg and find similarities as well as dissimilarities. The lower confidence and unfamiliarity with the language calls for an incidental teaching of teachers as well.

3. English language is alien: In an environment where the language isn’t encountered at home, spoken at school, heard on media platforms or seen on signage, the language appears more alien. It becomes difficult to ‘surround’ or ‘immerse’ the student in it. There is no audio-visual input either.

4. Students aren’t part of the process of education, something that isn’t specific to resource constrained environments but an overall malaise of the education system. When students are more involved in the act of learning, ownership and acceptance, desire to learn increases.

• Outreach through Storytelling and Artworkshops: In order to understand the context of the users we did art and storytelling workshops with the children. Furthermore we spent time in their environment (fly on the wall) understanding their context and the presence of english or their lack of in their environment.

• Kullu’s Curious Kollu: Integrating the illustrations and nature from Kullu, I created a children’s story book. The intention of the storybook was to imbue confidence in the children and impart a sense of ownership. 

  Insight: The outreach with the book taught us that engaging with content where they felt a sense of ownership (owing to the illustrations drawn by them) and can relate to (owing to the story set in a neighbouring town, borrowing from their landscape) makes it easier. The engagement with an alien language is made easier through content familiar to them.

• Baseline Study: A baseline study was conducted in May 2015 to measure the level of english proficiency of students in standards 6th and 8th. Post the initial visit, the project looked at book box. Book box is more than an out of the box method, it breaks the box. This is a strategy that uses same language subtitling to allow the viewer to listen to stories and read the accompanying captions, which are highlighted as reading progresses, somewhat like Karaoke singing. The English language project collaborated with Sensibol technologies as well for audio feedback mechanisms in order to check English proficiency. The collaboration with Sensibol technologies and book box nestled into the LETS application.

• Insight: From the baseline studies one of the key points that emerged was — 10-15% of students struggled with alphabet recognition. Confusing ‘b’ and ‘d’, ‘p’ and ‘q’ among other such pairs

Activity based learning

Activity based learning believes in the idea that children are active learners rather than passive observers. Activity based learning builds confidence as well as the ability to take one’s own decisions. Curriculum is divided into milestones. One goes to the next level on one’s own pace. It seems to be a good method for mixed age classrooms where students can make their own decisions

Hole in the Wall

4. Several people that I encountered here were dismissive of the tribal culture. Some teachers for instance would judge them on their drinking habits, choice of religion and even the crops they grew. The people from the community themselves do not speak of their culture with much confidence. It is thus essential to use content that acknowledges their lifestyle and shows potential for possibilities.

5. Students from Zilla parishad schools who join Grammangal later are weaker, so teaching is often done in separate groups. In English lessons while a group is made to tackle words and their meanings and sentence structure, the other is helped out with spellings. Often the latter group, i.e the Zilla parishad students would have issues in identifying characters, spelling words as well as pronunciation.

6. Children have a rich engagement with nature, animals and work at home, much of which is never reflected in the stories that surround them in school curriculum. They would talk about several hunting expeditions, the kind of animals they’d hunt and later eat. Their relationship with certain animals, their distrust of cows, fascination with snakes and indifference to most birds. We would come across flowers that one could use to whistle and lotuses that would open up on their whim. On the trip to Rangkhod, Akshay and Ajay were our personal guides, pointing to us the local names of several trees. Akshay’s father is a self- taught ‘vaid’. He claims that he can find a cure to everything and identify a plethora of trees and herbs simply by looking at them, however he cannot name them. Thus, his ability to transmit knowledge that he himself would like to pass on, is severely constrained. The pervasive influence of the English language in the daily lives of the people can enable them to tap their potential fully and facilitate dissemination and exchange of knowledge, thereby leading to a happier and more empowered community.”Some of the insights vis-a-vis student’s engagement with English language are:

1. Tippy Tippy tap toy

   A familiar toy juxtaposed with animals(from the context of children) and adjectives describing them. Incidental learning of adjectives and synonyms is intended

   Advantages: Frugal, Incidental learning, borrowed from context

   Disadvantages; Pictures and colours take precedence over word

2. Hexaflexagons/ Dodecahexaflexagon

   Hexaflexagons are paper hexagons folded from strips of paper which reveal different faces as they are flexed. A Dodecahexaflexagon is a hexaflexagon that is designed such that it has 12 faces, faces that are discovered through flexing. Moreover the order in which you flex it would lead to a huge number of possible traversals. The idea was to write stories on each of these faces. Stories whose nature should be such that traversal from any face to any other face would create a sequence that in turn makes meaning as well as stories. The toy would enthral the reader into flexing the toy till they can explore all possible story patterns.

3. Abecedarian BooK

   k Using contextual stories to teach A-Z characters drawn from the socio-cultural and geographical landscape of Aina, Dahanu. To reinforce akshar gyaan/ alphabet knowledge, these stories were to use alliterations. Repetition of letters through alliteration or by making stories cantered around a character whose name started with the letter were some strategies envisioned. The idea of the abecedarian book held promise, however the engagement with it could be less active. In my secondary research it became clear that rereading a book increases comprehension, phonemic awareness as well as engagement with the language. However, in resource constrained areas where the language is alien, who would read the book to the child multiple times? Readers’ families cannot read English most times and teachers may not be able to give attention to students. Thus more work was done on the same. Students with their limited proficiency may be able to read however more interest needed to be generated.

THIRD Update

This game was tested with the kids at Grammangal, Dahanu. Testing of game was met with positive feedback. Students played the game enthusiastically and enunciated the sentences with increased confidence. Peer to peer learning is assisted by the game. Player pieces keep some students engaged while they wait for their turn, while other more competitive ones would prevent the other student from completing. They did so by prompting using similar sounding words, preventing the player from seeing the sentence or using the player pieces to distract. The use of context, familiar images and words (like balewaadi, taadi) is engaging.

FOURTH UPDATE

In resource constrained areas one resource maybe used in multiple ways. The same game board maybe used as a storybook, thus I designed the game board, mindful of other potential uses. Hanging on the wall when narrating a story, spread on the floor whilst playing. The game is designed for a minimum seven kids to play at a time, it is printed on cloth and laminated to protect it.