CHENNAI: With the world getting more competitive every passing second, it is imperative for schoolchildren to be updated and fully armed with information before entering the real world. Aiming to guide them in this are organisations Rhapsody and Kruu, founded by pianist Anil Srinivasan. Rhapsody works on the line of music-based learning and Kruu with project-based learning.
The organisations were catering to the children of private schools. Noticing this, a challenge was put forth by the Minister for School Education Anbil Mahesh Poyyamozhi to introduce the same to government school students. Within two months the team of Rhapsody and Kruu launched T4T - Tamilians for Tamil Nadu. “Earlier it was professors across the world in association with Kruu that helped the students. Now it is rendered in Tamil by connecting professors of Tamil origin across the country to help the students with project-based learning,” said Anil on Monday during the launch of the programme. The minister presided over the event.
T4T is a scheme through which a thousand students from the schools that the organisations work with will receive a year’s worth of access to projects, of the subjects available in the regular stream, for free. This will eventually lead to internship opportunities in the industry and scholarship opportunities for higher studies.
A step ahead
The mission of the ongoing projects, aimed at private school students, is to help schoolchildren get a hang of various fields ranging from agriculture to artificial intelligence. Professors across the world get in touch with students and teach them the current developments in the industry. The best projects over the year and over the term were felicitated at the event. The best project was the development of an application for autistic kids to describe their emotions by students of DAV Boys School. “Using a machine-learning concept, a machine was trained to capture the text or speech by an autistic kid and convert it into emojis, a physical representation,” said Srinivas, a Kruu team member.
One of the projects was ‘Happiness in Connection to Health’, wherein the kids surveyed about 50 individuals with a questionnaire on their everyday activities that relate to happiness. “I was in a team of two. We worked on the project for two weeks. It was quite fun to work on the project. We were constantly guided by our professor,” said Sai Ramya, a student. She added that the project ideas put forth were quite interesting and increased her curiosity to learn and understand more.
On the other hand, selected government schoolchildren presented their projects on various topics. Speaking fluently in English and with thorough knowledge of the subject presented, the students were quick and confident enough to answer the questions raised.
Going beyond the conventional methods of learning, Kruu and Rhapsody are working every day to bring an educational system that is ahead of the system that exists.