My Experience with IIA Outreach
Varun Kumar, Project Engineer-I (ADITYA-L1)
After joining IIA for Integrated M.Tech – PhD course in July 2013, I and my four other batch mates left for Kolkata for mandatory one-year course work at the University of Calcutta. During my stay at Kolkata, the IIA outreach photos uploaded on social media by our seniors attracted me towards IIA outreach. Those photos were quite amazing, and I would often imagine myself one among them learning and explaining to school kids. After returning from Kolkata, I joined the group immediately. During the Beginning days, I just used to accompany them as a 12 th Man.
Later once I was through, I became an active member; in fact, a student representative for almost 2.5 years. I must say this has been so far a very memorable experience for me. Through the IIA outreach, I have learned many things, most prominent being “how to speak in public”. It was during one of our outreaches on lunar eclipse (Jan. 31, 2018) which we planned on “Lalbagh Kempegowda Tower” that gave me real experience of “public speaking”. A crowd of around 5000 was eagerly waiting to watch the eclipse which was happening during the beginning hours of the night, and we had a small hand mic to address them. Once a copper moon appeared in the sky, people started shouting and moving here and there to find a place to watch it happening. It was tough to manage the crowd with a small hand mic. I still remember one of the parents who has come with her 5-year-old daughter to watch the event, asking me “Have you guys thought of crowd management while organising this event?” I had no answer because we haven’t thought about it and not planned as well. I was literally praying to God to pass the event smoothly. This event has given me immense satisfaction and courage to do more public events.
Apart from regular IIA outreach, which includes visiting Govt. schools, organising school visits to IIA campuses, and National Science Day celebrations, Sandeep and me (both were Outreach student representatives) always tried to expand our outreach activities at IIA. We introduced a “teacher training program” at IIA for the first time. We felt that especially science and maths teachers in Govt. schools are only engaged in black/whiteboard teaching. Students of class 7th to 9th have literally no experience of small science experiments related to their subjects. These small experiments develop scientific thinking among them. We thought why not train middle and high school teachers to teach the subject in class with small experiments such that students will take more interest in learning them. Arvind Gupta’s “Toys from Trash” for learning influenced this idea. We drafted the plan and presented it to our director through outreach in charge, and he agreed with the required IIA funding as well. The Next daunting task was to contact the Govt. School teachers. We have made several rounds to DSERT, DIET offices to meet the directors and convince them to allow Govt. school teachers to attend this program. We successfully convinced them, and in return, we got a list of 50 school teachers from different parts of Bangalore. Though we have got the teachers’ list, we were doubtful about their attendance on that day (17th June 2017). To ensure attendance, we contacted them over the phone one day prior to the event. In parallel, we PhD students were also working tirelessly on the content to keep the training simple, very informative, and interesting. We successfully conducted this program with 45 teachers and provided them with certificates and experiment kit bags so as to perform the basic experiment with students and encourage them to make their kits. This event gave me personal satisfaction and readied me as an “event manager”.
We have successfully conducted this event consecutively three years before this COVID-19 pandemic and hope that we will resume it in the coming days when things will be normal. To summarise this program’s effectiveness, we keep getting phone calls from teachers requesting to visit their school and conduct an outreach program.
The other benefit which I gained from the IIA outreach program is knowledge enhancement. These school kids have several interesting questions, which we sometimes fail to answer, and in this process, you keep exploring yourself to answer next time when you encounter such questions. Later in 2018, I passed the outreach baton to juniors who are continuing with outreaches with the motto of “service to our society”.
