By Business India Editorial

Lenovo’s holistic approach in collaborating with grassroots organisations and leveraging its cutting-edge technology expertise in supporting quality education for students encompasses capacity building and training of teachers as well as developing STEM mindsets in students. Lenovo’s EdTech Classroom Intervention with the Meghshala Teacher Enablement Program and partnership with Agastya International Foundation are supportive of providing inclusive, core educational inputs aimed at developing learners’ talents. 

India faces a multitude of educational challenges, including ineffective curriculums and a disconnect with ground reality. There are more than 100 million children enrolled in schools at the primary level in India. With such large numbers, the quality of teaching and outcomes are not of a uniform high level. Improving the quality of teaching and learning at every level of a student’s life is therefore of paramount importance.

Echoing Lenovo’s vision, Smarter Technology for All, these projects are intended to be technology-focused, minimising wastage and drop-out rates in poverty-stricken areas.

Starting off with an experiential hands-on learning session that thereby propagates STEM mindsets in students in their formative ages, Lenovo and Agastya Foundation’s Mobile Education Programme supports 10,000+ underprivileged students across India.

The project employs a new initiative, ‘Lab-On-a-Tab,’ that makes education more interactive and effective in government schools, aims to provide self-paced, high-quality hands-on education to supplement the existing teaching and learning methods. This will be implemented by using technology support from Lenovo to convert physical experiments into e-experiments for the children. Initially, students and teachers of government schools were provided with Lenovo A-1000 tablets which were pre-loaded with applications designed by Agastya Foundation and C-DAC, to enable the teacher to engage the students through interactive learning.

Lenovo also supports three iMobile Labs. In this programme, local community youth are trained to be teachers on the iMobile Vans, thus creating an economic opportunity within the community. The iMobile Labs reach out to rural communities on the outskirts of Gurgaon, Bengaluru and in the slums in Mumbai.

Lenovo-Agastya Science Centre: These programmes run in Haryana, Karnataka and Maharashtra, providing hands-on education to the underserved students and teachers have garnered a total of 106,000+ exposures to date. The programme seeks to transform and stimulate the thinking of economically disadvantaged children in schools where access to the Internet and technology is limited. One of the top highlights also includes the new learning pedagogy of Explore, Play and Learn sessions promoting self-learning, questioning capabilities, and self-exploring capacities of students using digital content.

The second initiative is that of promoting the use of technology for teachers’ capacity building with access to quality education through digitised and vernacular content through the Lenovo Meghshala Teacher Enablement Program.

The philosophy underlines Lenovo’s mission to empower a diverse, underserved and underprivileged populace by increasing access to Science, Technology, Engineering/English and Mathematics education. The adoption of the locations chosen to implement our programs also underlines the mission. For example, the East Garo and West Khasi Hills district in Meghalaya have low intervention in education in India as its geography and terrain pose a big challenge to development while the Yadgir district of Karnataka is one of the aspirational districts identified for education by NITI Aayog. This district lacks drinking water, toilets, drainage, transportation, and educational facilities.