It takes two to tango – Teaching underprivileged children computing through digital literacy and computational thinking

Samuhik Pahal (SP): Please share with us the challenges of working on computing with underprivileged school children from remote, underserved villages.

Venkat Natraj Ramasamy (VNR): Asha for Education has 60 chapters across the world. I represent Asha Chennai. There are about 11 chapters in India, the rest of them are across the world. Most of the chapters outside India raise money. The chapters in India actually provide education. I am only going to talk about Asha Chennai because each chapter is independent, and we do our own work. So, Asha Chennai focuses on remote rural villages. What we find is that most NGOs like to be in an area where they have their offices, or they operate in areas in which companies have their CSR operations.

We, however, work in remote rural schools in Tamil Nadu, which typically are not served by other NGOs, and in places that require the most help, because they don’t have access to quality education. We have multiple programs. One of them being the computer science program. So, we have an Asha Computer Science (CS) curriculum. It goes from the first to the eighth standards. We want to get them early and we want to be able to separate the curriculum into two pieces. One is digital literacy and the other one is computational thinking.

In many developed countries digital literacy is almost automatic. Children there have access to computers, or they use smartphones. In many of the villages that we go to in India, many of the children don’t even have access to phones. The parents are not wealthy enough to even buy a smartphone.

Therefore, we focus on digital literacy. In the first and the second standards, we introduce children to some basic keyboarding skills, usage of computers, mouse, etc., using games. We have a product called Asha Kanini, which we use to teach most of our courses. It contains about 80 packages that are all opensource. We have some of our own content, but mostly it fills gaps in the content. Most of the content is opensource, which we curate very carefully for each lesson in the government school curriculum in Tamil Nadu. We have also done this for UP, as we also support some schools in the state.

Our teachers use this curriculum to teach computer science in first-standard and second-standard classes. Some of the packages we use for the first and the second standards are from GCompris. Their opensource software is free for all to use, except for one or two things that we license for a very minimal amount. In the third standard we use Tux Paint, a free and opensource graphics editor, for digital literacy. We also use similar software to teach children math skills. And then we have a third item involving unplugged activities. This is where we start introducing children to computational thinking. These are activities that you can do physically that will teach you certain concepts in computer science.

Let me give you an example. Let us take one of the activities, like a grid activity where they have these tiles and we put obstacles in the middle, when we have a person standing out and there is a treasure. You tell the human being to go find the treasure, they can go find it. They can look at it and they can see the obstacles. The computer cannot do that. So, they have to say things like – they must walk a certain number of steps. So, sequencing comes in. Then if they see an obstacle there, they must turn left or right. Through this we teach them conditional statements. When they take a certain number of steps, we teach them looping. Through such processes we explain to them what those things are.

And so there are a lot of these kinds of unplugged activities. We have developed some of these. Some are created by others. There is a website created by University of Canterbury in New Zealand that has some of these activities. We use many of these to teach computational thinking in the fourth and the fifth standards.

SP: Before we go on to discuss details about your other initiatives in computational thinking, we request you to please elaborate a little more on the work that you do with children on digital literacy.

VNR: The purpose of digital literacy in our programs is to help children to not be afraid to take any computer software program or operate a new computer, etc. To do that they have to become quite adept at using these things. Therefore, we teach them how to use things like spreadsheets, presentations, Word documents, etc. For this we use an opensource software called Open Office, which is similar to Microsoft Office.

We also teach children how to search on the internet. They learn how to use the internet, how to access information, and how to use this information. And so that is what we focus on with digital literacy. For example, if they want to book a ticket or want to go do banking or something, then hopefully, they are not afraid to do so. We expect that the education we facilitate for them will enable them to just go ahead and say, “Oh, I can figure this out.”

Our focus is primarily on doing projects. So, what we have found is (and I am sure a lot of the research also says this) that when you just learn, you don’t retain all that all the time. However, when you do a project, you do retain quite a bit. So, at the end of the fourth and the fifth standards, our children are supposed to do a presentation.

These presentations, in terms of the project that they do, involve digital literacy skills rather than computational thinking. They use what they have learnt, do a project of their choice and prepare and show a presentation using all the tools they have learnt. We make sure they use custom animations, audio, video, and other things like that.

Some of the projects are on history. The presentations will have information about the industrial revolution or how the British came and how we got independence, etc. There are also presentations about their farming on different kinds of lands – these are the popular ones. Children do presentations on different kinds of dances, states and languages as well. They do a lot of those things. There are also projects on science subjects.

Many of our children, who have been with us for a very long time, (please remember that the children with whom we started work in 4th standard are now in 10th and 11th standards), they still remember their projects and presentations. And so, whenever they do something like that, they have to go through a process when something doesn’t work, they have to figure it out. All these things give them the ability to go in, do research, explore and learn.

SP: When do children start exploring areas directly related to computational thinking and programming, etc.?

VNR: In the sixth standard we again focus a little bit more on the internet and then start programming using Scratch. In the 7th and the 8th standards we do mostly Scratch programming, and games and stories, etc., using the programs. And this year we are starting physical computing. So, we have a board. That has a heat sensor, a light sensor, things like that, which they use. They have LEDs that they can light up, they have sound; they can make that device talk. This is our curriculum from the first standard to the eighth standard.

For the 7th and the 8th standards they do a project using Scratch. And of course, this year there will be a project using the embedded systems board as well, which is more directly related to computational thinking. So, in the lower grades, our program is not directly tied to computational thinking, it is more to do with digital literacy. We don’t teach them programming on the computers. But we do computational thinking activities, the unplugged activities we have talked about.

All this work is supported by Asha Kanini, which is an application developed by us that helps teachers identify the right content for their lessons. It has an archive of freely available online content. We have mapped these to lessons for the various classes.

Asha Kanini is available on both Windows and Android. It has been designed with the requirements of remote rural schools in mind. It is independent of networks, platform, curriculum and language. Asha Kanini is free for anybody to use for all the subjects. If you want to just use it, let’s say you want to talk about friction, for example. You can go and search for friction. It doesn’t have to be mapped to the curriculum. So that is available in English. Some of it is now available in Hindi as well.

The content of Asha Kanini is divided into three parts. There is content for teachers. Basically, the teachers must understand how they are going to teach the pedagogy. They will do that before they go to class. Asha Kanini also has content for students which is of two types – passive and active. The passive content just explains the concepts to them. So, it is typically a video or something like that. However, passive content is probably not the most effective way to communicate. But then they must understand the concept.

After we have taught them the passive content, we go into active content, which is basically simulations and games that they can play. Some of these games are very interesting. Children continue to do these repeatedly and as a result they remember the concept extremely well. This curriculum is for all the school subjects such as math, English, history and geography, etc. It is the same as what the government offers. We just support that curriculum using digital content. For all the schools that we support, we provide them with math kits, English kits, things that they can use to teach without having just a book, you know, they can touch and feel and be able to learn. If you are a teacher, we have lesson plans for every lesson.

Our computer science curriculum is also available as a part of Asha’s website. Other than that, we support about 150 government schools in the lower grades in primary and middle school levels.

We also run a program called “Explore.” Here we go to a particular school, three to four times a year. So, typically once a trimester, we go to these schools, and teach them basic digital literacy, basic programming, and a set of curated activities. These include the unplugged activities I talked about earlier, as many of these schools don’t have electricity all the time. When they lose electricity, the best way to engage them is through unplugged activities. So, it usually takes about an hour.

SP: Thanks for sharing these details. The aspects of teaching and learning computational thinking and digital literacy that you have shared till now ride heavily on the government school system. Does Asha for Education have ways in which it directly interfaces with children in the communities you work in?

VNR: We run a project called an RTC, which is a Rural Technology Centre. It primarily targets students from 6th to 12th standards, who want to learn more advanced topics in computer science. Many of these children have never seen a computer before. Some of them need to learn digital literacy. In the RTCs there are also some of our children who have come from a middle school that we already support. For them we start teaching programming right away, because they already have digital literacy.

In the RTCs we teach computational thinking. We also teach them programming using Scratch. We teach them more advanced courses as well. Now we teach them animation using JavaScript, and we teach them web development. The goal is to help them learn how to write programs, create websites, use HTML, CSS and JavaScript, etc. We also teach them physical programming, which is the board that I talked about. So, there is data science involved. We use data to figure out how the computer could start thinking a little bit more like a human being. So, these are the courses that we offer as part of the RTCs.

We rent some space within the villages, usually right next to the school, so that the children can walk directly to our centers. But some RTCs also support multiple schools. We have two teachers in the RTC. One of them goes to a high school close-by. The children come to us from these schools and even some other neighboring schools when they know about it. Now that we have been in many districts since 2002, many of the schools know about us. They send their children to us at 4.30 p.m. after the school is over. They stay at the centers till 7:30 p.m. to learn.

SP: What is the importance of collaborations and partnerships in your work in the computer science education space in schools?

VNR: We have a partner called code.org and we use some of their projects. Amazon is one of our main partners. They have curated one-hour activities as well. Then, we also have what is called a “Class Chat.” In this program, typically what happens is that an employee from let’s say Amazon will volunteer and talk to our children about their journey, how they became computer science experts, or even what other jobs that they might have at Amazon.

They talk about their own experiences, their own jobs, to just give the children a flavor of what it would be like when they go into the corporate world after education and stuff like that. Many of these rural children don’t have access to that information. Everyone in their village is either farming or trying to do factory jobs.

This year we have selected about 50 schools in these remote villages. We will train government teachers to use our Asha computer science curriculum. We have curated a one-year curriculum where they will teach the students.

At the end of that, we plan to do a competition that we are calling “Impressions,” where children would compete for the best presentations, best computer science programs, best physical computing programs, etc. We plan to provide a digital lab for them, maybe 5 or 10 computers for whoever the winner is. We will select the first three schools and empower them with more computers. We also collaborate with higher education institutions like IIT Madras, and companies like Ford, Amazon and Hyundai, who support our intervention schools with computers and equipment.