HYDERABAD: Among the new and innovative forms of education that are taking root, Sriram Rengarajan hopes to make his mark through providing inspiration. A web designer who took the social entrepreneurship route, Sriram has launched a free online comic based on maths (yes, maths!) with the aim of providing that spark of inspiration among children of suburban and rural areas.
Having worked in a company that had tied up with the US-based Sally Ride Science Foundation is what gave him the motivation to start his project. “Sally Ride was the first American woman in space, and throughout her years, she realised that there was a huge disparity in how girls take up math and science, especially in a developed country like the US,” says Sriram.
The realisation that the problem in India was far worse made him
try to come up with something to redress the gap. “Today, though we have stalwart women achievers in each field, we can’t name as many as their male counterparts. For some reason they are always outnumbered by their male colleagues.
There is a social pressure in India not to encourage women to excel in these fields. You can’t observe the magnitude of problem in developed cities, but it is a problem in suburban and rural areas,” he rues.
Sriram’s ‘moment of reckoning,’ as he calls it, came in 2012 after his father passed away, and he quit commercial software development to start a non-profit, Education through Inspiration for Girls (ETIG). Though it reads as inspiration for the girl child, Sriram emphasises that it is open to all children irrespective of gender.
“During my research I realised that inspiration can be a factor in enhancing your cognition. That’s how the Scary House of Math, the first series of comic books, came up.” The storyline involves two kids, who stumble onto a house built by a mathematician. They stumble onto the house and get lost inside, and need to solve certain problems to get out. “This was intended to remove the math is scary part and replace it with a fun part.”
“You can actively learn something, and passive learning supports and fortifies the learning. That is the reason behind integrating stories into these”, he explains. “My main aim is to target the children in suburban and rural areas, to bring them on par with privately tutored kids. Each part of the six-part comic series will be released one after the other, for free online, until June this year. I am also looking at expanding it as a 32 page book, explaining four or five problems in each concept.”
His current effort is to get schools to utilise it on a large scale. “The problem is schools already are occupied with their regular schedules, and I am finding it a bit tough to elicit interest in the project and introduce it for feedback from children.” He is also looking to create Tamil translations for ease in vernacular understanding.
The script is by Prasanth Ashokhan, with the concepts of math chosen and incorporated by Meenakshi Iyer, a teacher at an international school in the city. The current series ‘Scary House of Math’ is targetted at Class IX students. “We came up with a fortnightly contest to bridge the gap and to gather metrics on the impact of the comics themselves. We would like to have enough schools to come forward and interact, and would also like to evolve it into an interactive game as well.”
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