[ad_1]
Kashmiri engineer Shoaib Dar founded the Pi Jam Foundation to provide free computer education to rural children and turn them into future-ready innovators.
“How many of you have used a computer?”
The Grade 7 students’ answer to this question surprised Shoaib Dar, a classmate at Teach For India at the time. The engineer-turned-teacher couldn’t believe that only one of them had used this electronic device.
To prepare his students for the digital world, Shoaib conducted a 10-day boot camp with four Raspberry-Pi computers, which cost 4000-5000 rupees. Students create their own games and animations as well as come up with programmed solutions to everyday problems.
This incident prompted Shoaib to create the Pi Jam Foundation in 2017, an NGO that aims to promote digital literacy among rural children. The organization has so far provided 400 computers to 15,500 children in 51 schools around Telangana, Maharashtra and Jammu and Kashmir.
One of the students’ innovations is a weather monitor that checks parameters such as humidity, temperature, precipitation, and wind speed. The data collected from this device is now being used by the Indian Meteorological Society in Pune.
The 31-year-old said, “Kids feel that computers are these complex machines that you control. I want them to understand that the opposite is true. Also, I didn’t want them to feel like working with computers is a hobby or an extracurricular activity. I want them to To see the potential for learning these skills and how they can be involved in shaping the changing digital world.”
Hear the inspiring story of Shoaib and his NGO here:
(embed) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3HHysXiRCs (/embed)
Edited by Yoshita Rao
[ad_2]
