BENGALURU: Choosing the right career has always been confusing. When is the right age to decide your career and what helps make that decision?
A group of three Bengalureans came up with a concept of a Career Box a year ago. And in this short span of time, it has found users in Dubai, Delhi, Pune, Chandigarh and Hubbali. On January, the kit will be launched in Greece.
It was launched by the Institute of Experiential Learning, an organisation that believes learning should be guided by an individual’s skills and designs lessons that involves all senses and hands-on experience.
The idea of the Career Box came from a personal experience. “When I was a student, I used to take a lot of online tests to see what career would best suit me,” says Mehar Zariwala, director of the institution. “Those were like IQ tests that did not actually tell me what I was good at.”
The Career Box also called the Career Leap Kit was a project initiated in 2014. After a lot of trial and error, the contents of the box were finalised last year in January with seven experiential kits that caters to multiple intelligence theory.
The first is the Maker Kit to test your spatial intelligence. Inspired by Leonardo Da Vinci’s catapult model, wooden construction materials are available to build the catapult. You can assess how quick you can construct it and evaluate your visual thinking.
For those interested in linguistics, there are linguistic riddles, animated graphic novels and comic book templates where you can build a story looking at the graphics.
The kit offers a juggling device and a break dance manual to test kinesthetic skills such as movement and flexibility. These kits are called the Game Changer Kit. For the math lover there is an Investigator Kit, containing clue cards and trivia booklets. The kit is all encryption-based that requires critical thinking and a skill to decode.
The compact kit contains a colourful xylophone to measure an individual’s aptitude for rhythm and composition of music. The musical book contains simple music of ‘Mary had a little lamp’ to complicated shuffled ones. Like all other kits, this too has three levels.
The last two categories are to test a person’s nature – interpersonal or intrapersonal. For intrapersonal people, there are flash cards and road-map posters, which they can play by themselves for reflective thinking.
For the interpersonal, there are communication puzzles and Bingo games, for interactive play.
The institution has built an in-house software that analyses the report that tells you what field are you good at and advices you to choose careers falling in the category.
The kit is ideally for students who are in standards 8 to 10. Deepak Singhi, principal of Eicher School in Himacahl Pradesh, says, “The kit will be part of school curriculum from next year. One kit can be used for five children and so far we have six kits.”