Several people visited Thiruvallur to see the Sangamam project schools as well as the RTCs from late Feb to late April. Here are the reports and photos from the visits.
Aswini has been a volunteer with Asha Princeton a few years ago. She has recently been volunteering with Sai Trust to help educate children in a village near Chengalpet. She wanted to learn more about what we are doing with government schools. I took her on a visit to see our office and a few schools. We participated in a meeting of the Asha Kanini trainers at the office. Then we visited the schools: PUPS Athivakkam, PUMS Neyveli and our library at Annanagar. Here is a report written by Aswini.
Prof I.R.Krishnam Raju, Principal of B.V. Raju College of Engineering and Prof. P Venkata Rama Raju, a computer science professor in the same college wanted to visit our Rural Technology Centres to see what we are doing. They had a centre for providing free STEM classes to government schools in the area. They wanted to find out what they can do in that centre. It was very gratifying for us that they visited us on 4th March 2022 and took the trouble to understand in detail what we are doing. Here is a report written by them.
Vinod is a classmate of mine from IIT Madras. He visited Sangamam project schools along with me on 31st March 2022. We met at our Sangamam office and then visited PUPS Thiruvalangadu, PUPS Manjakuppam, PUPS Varadhapuram, PUMS Othappai, PUPS Ammambakkam and our Seethanjeri RTC. At these schools, rather than get bored listening to me, he was off on his own observing interesting things! He also clearly enjoyed taking photos and videos. He was taking photos and videos at various places between the schools as well. This created an album which I thought conveyed my own experience of these visits better than any other album.
Priya who manages the CSR for Amazon India and Akshay who oversees the Amazon Future Engineers program visited Sangamam schools on 5th April 2022. We wanted to give them an overview of all the things our computer teachers do. So we organised the trip as follows:
- PUMS Othappai — Sulochana showed them what we do for classes 1 and 2.
- PUMS Nelvoy — Parameswari showed them what we do in terms of digital literacy for classes 6 to 8.
- PUPS Greenvelnatham — Dhatchayani showed them what we teach classes 4 and 5 mainly with Open Office.
- PUMS Ramanjeri — Seetha, one of our lead teachers showed them how we teach programming for classes 6 to 8.
- GHSS and RTC Kanakamma Chathram — Kumari, our lead for RTCs, and Eswari showed them what we teach and what we plan to do with technology education for classes 9 to 12.
IITM has been supporting several initiatives of Asha including taking Asha Kanini to the government schools as well as the Rural Technology Centres. Our RTCs are part of the broader strategy of IITM in its rural technology push. In these regards, four IIT professors visited our schools and RTC on the 27th of April. They were,
- Prof Pijust Ghosh from the Mechanical Engg Dept.
- Prof Abhijit Deshpande from the Chemical Engg Dept.
- Prof Richa Ararwal from the Management Studies Dept.
- Dr. Balaganesan from the Central Workshop Facilities.
They visited our office. Then we took them to PUPS Thomur for them to see what we do at primary schools and to PUMS Ramanjeri for them to see what we do at middle schools. We then took them to GHSS Kanakamma Chathram and to the RTC at Kanakamma Chathram. At the RTC, the teachers from the Seethanjeri RTC and the other staff associated with the RTC, Srinivasan the coordinator, Muthu and Anand the system engineers also came for a short meeting. After interacting a bit with the children the professors left. I stayed back a little longer to also see some presentations by the children. They had done good work with presentations and programs.
Here is an album with a few photos from this visit.