During the holidays in May, the Glovis Sangamam teachers participated in several training sessions including a 8-day residential training on Programming and Maths at Auroville.

Sanjeev Ranganathan a long time volunteer of Asha, has been working at two schools, Isai Ambalam and Udhavi schools in Auroville for the last decade or so. He has been experimenting with innovative ways to use computers to further STEM education. He organised a 8 day workshop “Programming for Math Educators” at the Udhavi school from May 2nd to 10th. When I asked if any of our teachers would like to participate in the workshop I was honestly not expecting anyone to volunteer. Instead much to our amazement 10 teachers volunteered! It is to be appreciated that each of them took time fro their family and other commitments to attend this workshop during their summer holidays. Teachers from Thulasi were also hoping to join but couldnt in the last moment.

They all went to Auroville on the 1st of May and reached there in the night. Initially they were welcomed by heavy rain, clogged toilets and power-cut. Further friendly neighbourhood scorpions, snakes and other insects come to welcome them! They almost cancelled the whole trip and returned! However with day-break things started looking better.

They enjoyed the training. The different perspective that Sanjeev and the schools have on education were a breath of fresh air for the teachers stifled by the typical rote learning methodology. They learnt a good bit about programming with Scratch (which they were already familiar with), Geogebra and Alice. Using programming to teach Maths was also something new to them. We hope the teachers teaching at middle schools, will be able to incorporate some of that into their teaching.

Rajaram and Venkat visited them and spent the whole days attending the sessions and talking to Sanjeev on the 7th of May. The teachers also got a day to look around the Auroville and Pondicheri during their trip.

Besides this, there was also a workshop organised by Ramanujan Museum with Arvind Gupta. Four teachers from Sangamam, three teachers from Manigal and Rajaram attended the teacher workshop by Arvind Gupta on the 26th of April.

Radhika and Nathiya our lead English and Maths teachers organised sessions where teachers created their own TLM materials. They will be able to use these at their schools when the schools reopen in June.

Here are the photos from the Auroville training trip.