 On behalf of the center, I will like to say initiate the proceedings. Today we have gathered here for the inaugural program of Vigyan Pratipa project. At the start of the project, at the start of the program, I would request Dean of HBCSE faculty, Professor Gula Channawala to welcome the gathering. So good morning again and welcome. It gives me great pleasure actually to welcome all the stakeholders in this program for which we have organized for the inauguration of the Vigyan Pratipa project. I extend a warm welcome to all the students from Kendra Vidyalay, from Navodaya Vidyalay and from Atomic Energy secondary schools and their teachers and their principals as well as the various dignitaries from our partner institutes who are present today. I would like to make a special mention of the regional commissioner of Kendra Vidyalay, Ms. Chandana, of the regional commissioner of Navodaya Vidyalay Sanghatna, Pune, I think Dr. Gupta, Dr. Smita Mahale, who is the director of the National Institute of Research and Reproductive Health and Dr. Gopala Engar of the Ministry of Earth Sciences for attending this launch today. Of course I will also, it would be remiss if I do not mention our colleagues from the main campus TFR with, beginning with the director Sandeep Trivedi, Professor Sanjay Varte Gaonkar and Wing Commander George Antony. We are of course joined via video conferencing with our colleagues in the Sahar Institute of Nuclear Physics and I would mention Professor Ajit Kumar Mohanthi, Director SINP and Dr. Amit Ghosh, who has been active in this project since its very inception. The chief guest of today's program who will be inaugurating it, Dr. Shekha Vasu has just arrived and I request Professor Subramaniam, the center director to felicitate him. It's my turn now to welcome all the HBCC members who have been participating in this program and specifically our past center director who is present here physically, Professor Pradhan and via video conferencing, Professor Jayashree Ramdas. Since we have a packed schedule now with presentations on what actually is the Vidyan Pratibha program and the activities that we have developed and also spaces and time for voices from the audience I look forward to a very enlightening morning. Thank you. Thank you, Professor Chunawala. We would like to invite Professor Sandeep Trivedi, Director TIFR for his welcome address. Dr. Shekha Vasu, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and Secretary in the Department of Atomic Energy. Professor Ravi Subramaniam, Professor Sugra Chunawala, my distinguished colleagues from the Kendriya Vidyalaya and Navoda Vidyalaya Sangatans from the Earth Sciences Ministry. My distinguished colleagues joining us from the Sahara Institute and across the Department of Atomic Energy family and of course my distinguished India colleagues from all across Tata Institute including the main campus. Most of all my dear students from Kendriya Vidyalaya, from Navoda Vidyalaya and so on thank you very much for being here today and a very warm welcome to HBCSC and to this morning's function. I think it's a very exciting function. It marks the launch of a very important program. I'm very thankful to Dr. Vasu to find the time to be here because the program has been initiated under his leadership and guidance and it's a very exciting possibility for our center, the Humibaba Science Center, which has been spearheading in the country the growth of science education. It's a very exciting possibility for it to now take what we have learned about science education really more to the grassroots and to make a huge transformative effect. To engage with the students, to engage with the teachers and to spread our understanding of how we can improve science education. Kindle the excitement and joy of science in children and allow them to grow and blossom into young scientists, into young engineers who will then transform our country and take it towards greatness. So I think it's a very exciting possibility. I look forward to participating in this journey and we all look forward across TIFR and I'm sure also across the Department of Atomic Energy to helping in whatever we can to make it a big success. So with that I'll stop and again welcome you to this morning's function. Thank you. Thank you, Professor Trivedi. As he just mentioned, this program is being simultaneously held at Humibaba Center as well as Sahay Institute of Nuclear Physics Calcutta and I would request a director of Sahay Institute of Nuclear Physics Calcutta, Professor Mohanthi to give his remarks. They have joined us through video conferencing link so you can see them on the screen. On my personal behalf, I welcome you all to this program of the Dhyan Tadeva which is simultaneously being launched at HVCHC and Sahay Institute of Nuclear Physics. I will be just introducing the guests we have in our written in here. We have all distinguished invitees, the putting commissioner and chief commissioner of Endurovital Sangatana. I hope they have arrived or probably on their way to the chair. We have principals and teachers of all Kendra Vidyalava across the city. And more importantly, we have students from those schools. We have colleagues from Sahay Institute of Nuclear Physics from various energy sectors of the center. Director of VCC is also here. Professor Vidyalava from Sahay Institute of Nuclear Physics. We have such students that we hope our colleagues from the media to be present here shortly. And we have a representative from India, IAPT, India's Association of Pedesticals. So if you are not, you will be hearing about this program very shortly from the different presentations. So I won't take much of the time except saying that I thank you for coming here. The response has been very characteristic for the last couple of weeks. We have been going to the various schools, interacting with the students, teachers, principal. And the amount of responses that you can see from the auditorium is completely full. And more importantly, I hope that the hacky part of Chowai is a very active member of the schools. The experts told me that due to the larger academician, so as soon as the program is over, they will be rushing to the schools. So such a busy circle, instead of them, they are here. And after this program is launched, we are really going to be having a little discussion with you about this program and its progress at 3 minutes or more. This is a very novel initiative where we will be trying to get the talents when they are young, starting from the class 8 and go to 9 and 11. And we don't want to let them. We want to be moving along with them as they move on. It is a guarantee from the beginning, they will get settled in their life and hide. And in the process, we want to nurture the science culture and see that some of them are not alone. We will be contributing to the science and technology pattern of the country in the future to come. So I welcome you all once again for this program. And we will be seeing about this program more in a minute. Thank you very much. Thank you, Professor Mohanty. Now we come back to a speaker here. Our center director, Professor Subramaniam, would give you an overview of Vigyan Pratipa project. Many of you have heard about it through different channels. So the students have participated in some kind of data collection or activities. But many people had this question, what exactly is this Vigyan Pratipa? So we will try to answer that question. Thank you, Aniket. And good morning, all of you. Dr. Shekhar Basu, Secretary Department of Atomic Energy, Chairman of Atomic Energy Commission. Professor Sandeep Trivedi, Director, TFR. My esteemed colleagues from TFR who are present today, esteemed colleagues from the Sahai Institute who are present online. And I believe there are also colleagues who are present from other partner DA institutions, from Institute of Physics Bhuvaneshwar. There are other colleagues who are participating online from the Institute of Mathematical Sciences. And so I add my words of welcome to them. I'm very happy that the commissioners, regional heads of the Kendri Vidyalaya Sangatan, Jawahar Navade Vidyalaya Sangatan are also here. Representatives from the Ministry of Earth Sciences, from ICMR. Welcome to all of you. Dear students, teachers, very happy to see you here in big numbers. This program is for you. My colleagues at the Homi Baba Center, including former colleagues or former director, Prof. Pradhan is here. Prof. Jayashree Ramdas is online, as our Dean mentioned. I add my welcome to them. And dear friends, so today is the big day we've been waiting for to start off this exciting project in a formal way. Of course, we already started working. And I'll tell you a little bit about what we have been doing and also what the vision of the project is. So this is a talent nurture program. What is Vigyan Pratibha? It has two, the target schools are the Kendri Vidyalaya schools, the Navade Vidyalaya schools and the atomic energy central schools at present. They number about 1700 and all. We have two broad dimensions of the program. One is a nurture dimension, which will be done largely at the school level in after school hours along with teachers. Then we have an exposure dimension where students and teachers will visit national science labs, interact with scientists and so on. The nurture dimension is through self-selection. It's largely voluntary. Students will attend on the basis of motivation and interest. We don't want to put too many filters there. The exposure dimension, however, we have said that about 75% of the students accessing these exposure activities will be from disadvantaged groups which are identified on the basis of some defined criteria like location, language, parents' education, socio-economic status, gender and so on. So this gives you a little bit of introduction to the program and also hints at the motivation behind it. So what's the motivation behind Vigyan Patiba? We have many schemes in the country to identify and support talent such as the talent search, national talent search, the Kishore Vaigyanic Protsahan Yojna, the Olympiads, the JEE and so on. But we need an extended nurture program which we don't have. These programs emphasize largely selection and some amount of exposure but not so much of extended nurture. And we need to target the student population but does not get too many opportunities on their own such as extra coaching, home support and so on. And we hope that by the time they reach class 11 the students who are participating in this program will be prepared to take on challenges as well as any other student. What makes Vigyan Patiba different? Of course I already mentioned that it's extended nurture. We don't conceive of it as a top-down program. It's done in partnership with teachers and with schools so we see them as equal partners. We want to design and carry out the program along with them, alongside them. And we hope to support teachers continuously both from by their own peers as well as experts that the project will draw on. There's an underlying holistic vision of science and mathematics education which of course comes from our experience here as well as work done all across the world in science and mathematics education. I must say it's a multi-agency effort backed by the government very strongly backed by the government. And I must mention that we have received enormous support. I mean the program was essentially initiated by the Chairman Atomic Energy Commission Dr. Shekhar Basu who is present here today has taken deep interest, personal interest in the program. He's been helping us at every step and we're very happy to have that support and I'm sure it will go a long way in strengthening this program. We have also partnered institutions from DAE and from other arms of the SNT ministry and again Dr. Basu has taken the initiative to pull these institutions together. The project is informed by the Homi Baba Center's expertise developed over decades of work in science, technology, mathematics education what we abbreviate normally as STME. So I'd like to tell you a little bit about what the Homi Baba Center has been doing and what it brings to the Vigyan Pratibha. As I mentioned we have decades of involvement in student nurture and we have the nodal center for the science and mathematics olympiads in the country and we've been doing exceedingly well we've been doing this for about two decades now so the olympiad medals in six subjects over the decades so 99% of the students who have represented India have come back with an award with some medal or an honorable mention and 32% of those have been gold medals so we've been doing really well in this regard. We've been doing teacher orientation in an intensive way and for example in the last two years we've done about 25 workshops roughly and about 2,500 teachers and teacher educators have participated in these workshops most of them from India and a few from abroad as well from the neighboring countries we develop learning materials that's just a sample of them curricular books, co-curricular books olympiad problem solving books posters, exhibitions books in Hindi and so on we have a portal also in Hindi to research in science and mathematics education which is cutting edge research published in leading international journals which gives you an idea so we expect all of these different dimensions of homibaba center to contribute to this project and we look upon it as a major project of the center so what will students learn in science and mathematics in the Vigyan Pratipa project of course they will connect science and mathematics learning to local context environment and experience we think of this as a unique aspect of this program this general principles of science are connected to what students experience in their local environment and we want this to be a strong component a deeper understanding of concepts, principles and laws proficiency in process skills we know that process skills are important in science experimentation problem solving testing your hypothesis reasoning written and mental computation mathematics and so on the ability to develop and use mathematical, physical and computer based models of phenomena we want students also to be exposed to that is very important in the modern world especially the use of computers and digital tools making connections between topics and appreciating the coherence underlying science and mathematics enquiry and creativity in science and mathematics and we I want to mention also design and engineering skills because we don't see these as separate from science design and engineering skills need to go hand in hand with science learning in order to deepen the understanding and also the possibilities of creativity understanding of science society links and social scientific issues again something that HBCSE has done a lot of work in we have a foundation curriculum which has developed some decades ago focusing on social scientific issues we bring those also into the program skills of communication and collaboration so as you can see it's a very holistic vision and we are developing all of this is being formalized through a document called learning standards in science and mathematics we already have a few drafts and we are putting this document out soon we are not only focusing on these cognitive outcomes but also an effective dispositional outcomes persistence, self-belief, confidence habits of self-study autonomy in reasoning, discovery problem solving, appreciation of beauty in mathematics and science willingness to share ideas take risks and learn from mistakes willingness to listen to and provide critical support to a poor peer we believe in collaboration rather than emphasizing competition excessively respect for differences in ability and personality and humility so we believe these values are also important to the learning of science and to building a scientific and technologically capable organization we will be tracking gains continuously from the project we have already collected baseline data and some of the schools as the project unfolds we will collect more of this data from across the schools and these are some of the indicators to which we will be tracking student presentations and reports in meetings and workshops the number and quality of contributions by students in the Vigyan Pratibha magazine I'll tell you a little bit about this think of this as a platform for communicating with the teachers and for the teachers and students to communicate with the others in the project and we expect that the students find things make discoveries invent some of the make inventions etc that they'll share this in the Vigyan Pratibha magazine and we know that from other magazines in the country in mathematics education and science education that this is can be done so students are contributing new ideas and recent issues of the trait angles magazine and mathematics contains some of them and we hope that this will be a platform for that we'll track interest and participation levels of students and teachers we expect these to go up as the program continues and if the program is successful we expect more students at class 1112 to access opportunities such as Kishore, Vigyan Pratibha and Eujina, Je, Olympia NEST etc from the target group of schools We also expect capacity building of teachers to happen, their own professional expertise to grow both in content and pedagogy because we are working in partnership with them. I'll tell you a little bit about how we think of the implementation of the project. We have science circle activities in partnership with teachers at the school. That's the foundation, that's the base of the program. We have a cluster of 10 schools supported by a coordinator who will be full time looking after the project and the needs of the schools. We have a nodal science institution mentoring two or three clusters and we have a lot of strength in terms of science institutions across the country we'll be drawing on these. We have regional centers across India each supporting about 50 to 100 schools and these will be leading scientific institutions. And we have the project vision resource development and monitoring which functions which will be led by HPCSE along with partner institutions and as you already know, the Sahai Institute is working with us on this as well. What does the Homi Baba Center's role in particular developing learning standards, resources for activities, teacher training, resources, master trainers. We'll try to organize the training at the apex level. At the Vigyan Pratibha portal we'll manage the Vigyan Pratibha magazine which I just mentioned. Vigyan Pratibha's technology enabled the open source digital technologies will play a major role in the Vigyan Pratibha project. We'll have a portal which I just mentioned to support sharing of activities, discussions and reports. Teachers, students will share these. We'll have digital resources integrated with the activities. Activities which we are doing in schools will draw on the digital resources from the web and from other sources. We'll use digital learning tools for modeling in science and mathematics. All of this will be a part of the project. This is the rough timeline of the project. The startup phase is already begun. In fact, we are at the end of the startup phase. We have already launched activities in schools about 10 schools in and around Mumbai. And I'm happy to say that I think all of them are present today. The students, the teachers, the principals or senior teachers are here. The pilot phase will continue through this year till March 2018 in the 10 schools around Mumbai as well as the schools that the Sahe Institute is working within Calcutta, which is four schools. We have, in the coming years, this will be expanded. First year it will go to about 50 to 100 schools and we expect in about three years from then on that the project will cover all the target schools. In the future, we expect interested state governments also to take interest in the program and we'll have other fronts for the intervention of the program. We're looking forward to that. What is the significance of Vigyan Pratibha for science education in the country? I'd just like to dwell on this briefly. Firstly, we develop STME standards that science technology math education standards for attaining high proficiency at the school level, which we don't have. And we put this out for the country. Now we have larger numbers of more capable students in science and mathematics due to this program intervention. And these students will have exposure to national science labs and they will visit them. And many students in fact are not aware of the scientific strength in the country. And we expect that in future they'll be attracted to work in these science labs, do their research and so on. The involvement of science institutions in the project which are taking very great interest in the project, I must say. So it's likely to lead to centers of excellence dedicated to education, which is again a need in the country. And we hope that all this will contribute to building a scientifically and mathematically literate nation as Director T.F.R. mentioned, which is very greatly needed in the country. And it will of course, I think the holistic vision of the project, synergies with other kinds of work that the Homi Baba Center is doing, other agencies are doing. We expect those to build those synergies and that will contribute to building a mathematically literate nation. Okay, now I'll, this is about the project. Shortly after, in a short time, we will also present the activities that have been doing in the schools. Of course, we've just had a couple of weeks, two to three weeks time to develop and try out these activities. And they're developing, keeping the learning standards framework in view. They're simple. We have purposely intentionally designed them to be simple and accessible to students and teachers, but we believe they convey something important in science. Some activities open up themes and strands that are important current scientific research, such as material. So this will also be one of the strands in the activities. The activities are evolving. We expect and we know that there will be challenges on the ground. And as we encounter them, we will learn more about them and we work with the teachers and the schools the activities will evolve. So we have learned much already through the trials and we'll be refining the activities further. Thank you very much. That's the team which we have from Homi Baba Center. I must of course thank them because they've all been drawn from their respective projects temporarily. They've contributed to this program intensively in all themselves. They'll be returning back to their own projects, but I thank all of them. Thank you. Thank you, Professor Subramaniam. Now, again, we go back to SINP. As we mentioned, we already started some piloting of some activities, interacting with some schools. And similarly, similar exercise was also done at Kolkata. Our colleagues at SINP were involved in that. And the main person who was involved was Professor Amit Ghosh. I would request him to address the gathering. Limited facilities with activities as planned. One thing here, resource materials, but we must understand that this is a very complex problem after all, complex task. It has so much of varieties that one thing everybody will agree here that is also the main goal of the program that we have to find out balance and see they are not lost. There is no doubt in our minds that this is what we have to do. In fact, all nations do that. Some nations do that so aggressively that they almost drain out balance from other countries. It shows that our goal is also somewhat tied to our national policy and also to the international policies. And we have to ask this question many, many times to ourselves, do we really want it? If we find the talent among the students as simple here today, do we really want to give it the minimum decency he needs to survive? And at the end of the day, do we really want him to be in the country and serve? If yes, then my dear friends, we have to pull on ourselves today. And that is what the Vidya Kotiba program is trying. In a way, we have to adopt this piece as many people say, these talents and try our best just like the way parents take care of their kids that they prosper. Our country is poor in numbers, not in population. Number of PhDs in the United States and Canada in China is nearly as large as 50,000 per year. This number is below 10,000 per year in our country. But it's not all about numbers, it's also about quality. The three leading nations in the world that receive the most number of Nobel prizes across all disciplines are the United States of India, about 315, United States of America, I'm sorry, I hope it will be like that, about 350, United Kingdom, about 120, and Germany, about 100. Other major European nations are in 20s. India and China are less than 10. But the most ancient civilizations of the world are not doing so well in modern science. In Vidya Kotiba, we are going to assume that in spite of all these difficulties and prejudices existing in our country, the complexities of our societies and civilizations, hierarchies, caste, religion, languages, and everything else, talents exist. Seniors are born here. We have evidences for that. We have seen that in the past and also glimpses of that from time to time. And because talents exist, we must not ignore them. We must not close our eyes and always pretend to think about the other bigger problems we have, bigger problems. We have a nation to build, we have toilets to make, meaning in our solar system. Capture the tiniest fluctuations in space and time in the form of gravity waves. Find out the theory of quantum gravity and all this. But we also have some talents sitting out here and there. Sometimes more talented than all of us here and perhaps waiting for some help on some simpler problems, some simpler questions that they are puzzled about right now. The question is, shall we spare a little bit of our time to help these kids up or not at all? The choice is ours. Ladies and gentlemen, let me remind you of a movie. I'm sure some of you must have watched it called Radha Phooli. It's a story of a rat called Ravi who lived in a salon for Paris. From the beginning he had a nose for fine foods. Obviously he was different from the other kids in the neighborhood. By case we mean, who are also all rats. And because of this, he had to face a lot of troubles. The movie is a journey, a difficult one of course, of Ravi becoming one of the finest chefs in France. Ravi had to qualify several tests. He has an idol, Ravi from the beginning had an idol. He is Dhooshmi, the most famous chef in France. Ravi had to qualify several tests, satisfy the most dreadful of prejudice, untone, at the end he succeeded. That we have a very similar story here. Only it is still unwritten and to be unfolded. In 20 years from now, we will perhaps be able to see some of the story like Ravi in our neighborhood. But I wanted to say something else here. In the movie, the dreads chef, Husto, Lothar Phooli, anyone can prove that this is what Anton, the great creature, did not agree. But this is exactly what inspired Ravi because he was nobody. But the movie, Anton realized the true meaning of what Husto meant from anywhere. This is the message of the movie and this is also a message for us who are searching for talents. Talents can come from anywhere. Not only from the best schools, the cities, but sometimes also from other places. That is why the Vidya Pradivar program is set like this, to go places and see if there is one among all the kids who can stand up in front of the world and save the standard of Indian science very hard. It will mark the success of the program. The Vidya Pradivar program is very much evolving, as Dr. Ravi mentioned. We have identified some schools in Bombay and some in Kolkata. Most of them are here. They are principal teachers and the students with whom we spend some time. These students will tell us what they mean and what we have to teach them. Of course, as an institution, we have a mandate to do our basic research, but we also have a small component attached with it. A center called care whose mandate is outreach to reach out to the society and students. Our chairman, Dr. Vasu, the department of academic energy and the government is extremely supportive of such activities and we have been assured that this kind of support will continue. May I request you all to wish the best of luck for the program and for all the kids who are here and also who are not here, but will be here someday. Thank you very much. Thank you, Professor Ghosh. Now I would request our chief guest, Dr. Shekhar Vasu, who is Secretary of Department of Atomic Energy and Chairman of Atomic Energy Commission to address the gathering, give his remarks and formally inaugurate the Vigyan Pratipa project. Good morning to all of you. The best part of coming here is, apart from your program, is seeing young faces. And that really enthuses all the people who have been talking so far, including Professor Trivedi Subramaniam and also our friends from SINP. It is because of you we are here and let me give you some background because many things have been told but I have been given 10 minutes so I have to bore you for 10 more minutes. So let me tell you something what has not been told. Number one is, this is not my program or our program. It is the program of the nation. See, the other day in Science Congress in Chennai, Prime Minister announced that in, by 2030, India should become the third country in the world on science. So it is a very tall task and that was around the same time he had found some group of secretaries committee which included one committee on science and technology where eight of us, eight of the department, scientific departments were there together. So all taken together and you know these particularly managers here. They know that there is a big problem in science, getting students in science, getting interested in science and it is not Indian problem, it is a problem world over. Probably India the problem is less. So what we can do about it? And then it was one of the things scheme. There are two, three other schemes also which I did not talk about it because they have not announced but Vigan Pratibha was one of the schemes that was that has been announced already by the government and that is to mentor about 1500 children from 150 schools every year so that we get a big scientific number of students coming out of science in the end. And what is that? It is not that it is just speaking of students and giving them some stipend. It is mentoring them for 10 years. That means the program starts in the eight standard and it should go up to the point they come out of PhD. But the PhD parties say after PhD or even after they have completed the MSc or such level of science education then they try to go out of the country. Then we all our efforts have lost. So what is the success story? What is the index of success here? How many of the children whom we are mentoring today up to the PhD level? How many of them are really being remain in India to do science? It's not how many of them get Nobel Prize. That is not very important. How many of them do science? And how many, how much of that science is percolating to the masses? Because we are a poor country. So within this, so we have to do a lot to make science happen. And it is only through science it is possible to remove the level of our, remove the property from our country. So this is the program. This is a long, big one. And also you must think all the institutions that are involved, not the schools as well as the sanghathans or organizing bodies plus the DA institutes. All of them, it is a program of all of us. It is your program. It is not our program. It is your program which you have to make it a success. And it is again, it is not only DAE. It is all these eight number scientific ministries. They will also share the load because 1500 is not a small number. Maybe each of these institutions can manage 1500 like whatever Professor Subramaniam told. So it is up to that level only you can go. So it has to be a program all along, all higher, everywhere. And everybody should know about it. And to the extent possible, everybody should participate for it. And when we started the day where this discussion was going on, I suggested the name of Omegapa Science Center as the lead institution in organizing this. Everybody without a single hesitation, they said that because HBCS has so good name in the field of education research that there is no doubt that this is the best institution to lead this program. And also our friends at SINP Calcutta, they are also a very good enthusiastic team is there who wanted, who are immediately ready to do this, start this. And from the part of our side, DAE side, what we want to do is this year, we are starting two institutions are taking up. Next year it will be four or eight. So some multipliers should be there everywhere. And we have institutions in about 20 places. All of them should take up this number as well as the number of schools that they try to get organized. That number also should be increasing. And Professor Subramaniam has said a reasonably detailed program about this, but this program you must know that it is evolving. So whatever you want to suggest in any direction, please let us know. And at both at SINP as well as HBCS, if please let them know whatever government can do about it, we'll do about it. We are going to do it. And in this for the program to succeed, you must also realize it is the teachers who make all the difference. And science can be made exciting only by the science teachers. Or people around them. Sometime it may be his parents also do a lot. I can give you an example. Today probably I'm in this chair because we had a very good physics teacher in my college school. I still remember, I still respect him. He used to make physics a different thing, which is it is more, it was to be like a story rather than some dry matters. So the teachers make all the different. So it is the school teachers who have to take up. And also our scientist in that will make also try to make the difference in that something new, something exciting should be happening to them. And to the labs like SINP or TIFR, you also have to expose these children to our big facilities. Big facilities also make a big difference to the minds. Okay, if you see something big, if you find that it will be tomorrow, okay, I should do something, that child will start feeling something or I should work here. That's all makes the difference. And again, please remember, I repeat, it is your program. Come up with suggestions, whatever need to happen. It is the prime minister himself is supporting this. It's not just my support or our support. So you have everybody's support if you want to make it a success. So please go ahead and do whatever, whatever you would like to do to make it a success story. And please come up with suggestions, whatever is required. Thank you and wish you all the best. So I am happy to announce that our big and Pratibha program is launched from this platform today. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Basu. So this with formal inauguration, we come to the end of the first part of our function, which was a joint session with Sahay Institute. We thank our colleagues at Sahay Institute for their support. For the second part, we will be holding two independent sessions at two institutes. So we will be disconnecting the video link. Technical staff can take care of that. And I will invite my colleague, Dr. Ankush Gupta for the next part of the presentation. Okay, thank you, Dr. Suley. So what we are going to see for next half an hour is the trials which we did in 10 schools for past one month. See, this is, as we all realize, this is a massive task which we have been interested with. And sitting in these big offices and being exposed to latest research in science as well as education, we have a lot on our agenda. Okay, teachers should do this, teachers should do that, students should do this, students should do that. But we also want to be relevant and meaningful to them whom we are trying to reach. When we try to say that we need to nurture talent and particularly in government school systems, a lot of questions come to us. That, okay, do you know that most of these students are first-generation learners. Their parents know nothing about education. There is no learning environment at home. There are language problems. Most of them don't even understand formal Hindi or formal Marathi or even their tribal languages. How are you going to deal with it? And English is even a far-fetched issue. And even, I mean, we have a lot of experience at HBCSC for the last 40 years working with tribal schools, rural schools, as well as urban schools. But of course, we have found that every new setup is different, every new school is different, every new population is different. And we need, we want you to get a sense of what is our population which we are working with. What are the dynamics of the Navaday Vidyalay system, Kindri Vidyalay system, and the Atomic Energy School system, and where we can fit best without disturbing them too much and yet serving our purpose. So what we did, we ran a pre-pilot phase in June to July to assess, first of all, what our students and teachers really need. And secondly, we know a lot of weaknesses, but we also wanted to know what are their strengths because we know that every individual, every system, every society, how much ever problem there may be, there are always a lot of strengths. And these are the strengths on which we want to lay the foundations of our program. And we also wanted to create a baseline on to which we can compare, let's say, five years from now, how far we have moved. In addition to a baseline survey, we also conducted a few activities in the school to try out our ideas and see if these ideas are relevant to them. How do the students and teachers respond to these? As I said that we have a lot of experience from science education research. So we tried to imbibe these concepts from the education research literature within the activities. Now these activities, some of these activities were novel ideas and some of these activities are already the activities which are existing in the curriculum of the students. And we just wanted to do it in a different way. So the first activity I'll tell you about is activity on identifying the fibers. In fact, before doing these activities, we also did a survey with students, teachers, and principals, and we asked them several kinds of questions. So one of the questions we wanted to know that what are the topics in their books which students find difficult. We expected common answers like atomic theory or optics, electromagnetism. But to a great surprise, students also said things like fibers, because fibers is a chapter which is taught in class six, and agriculture. So these were a lot of surprise, because we thought that students don't always associate these things with hardcore science, but we, you know, students had a lot of curiosity about these topics. So, and this was a big opportunity for us because fibers have a lot to do with science. First of all, fibers are present all around us. Secondly, many of us don't know that one of the best and easiest way to test the identity of a fiber is burning it. In fact, this is a test which many people who work in fashion industry, fabric industry know. This test is also included as an activity in the class six curriculum. But the reasons why it happens, why do we, why can we differentiate between different fibers burning is not given. It's just given as a trial for students and teachers to see. The third thing, which I think most of us may not know is that fibers were the cause for invention of microscope. So we, the invention of microscope is usually attributed to a Dutch. Now we know him as a scientist, but actually Luwenhoek was a cloth trader. He had a small shop selling cloth. And of course, as every cloth shopper needs to know that whatever material is coming to me is it what is the quality of it, you know. I need to know whether I mean whatever price I may sell it at. So he used to use a lens. But then he realized one day that accidentally he melted glass beads. He saw that if he used two glass beads, you can see fibers in a much bigger magnification and he can find certain differences in the quality of fabric which is coming to him. And so we know that actually many of the inventions in science have not just come from people who are trained in sciences, but have come from people who are, you know, tradesmen or general people. For us, when we are looking at something for a mass education dimension, it is important that it affects the life of people. And fibers are something which affect the livelihoods of millions of people in this world. So it's a very important topic for us. So what we did in this activity, we took different kind of fibers and we first burned them in the class to show how different particularly synthetic and natural fibers burn. So I think burning is something which excites many students, young ones. The most important difference comes is because natural fibers when they burn, they leave a ash. This ash actually is metal oxides and we could relate this to the concept of metals, non-metals and acids and bases, which is there in class six chapter, is class eight curriculum of NCRT. This ash comes because metal oxides the basicity comes because this metal oxides when they react with water, they give you alkali. In fact, this was the method by which alkali's were manufactured before till 1800th century, sorry, 18th century. So you can easily see that using a pH paper or a litmus paper. In fact, we can also try various indicators, even like Haldi, which is a common food item and also many common indicators like phenolphthalein, which are there in every lab. Whereas if you burn synthetic fibers, you don't get any ash because they don't have metals in it. And so if you burn, in fact, you get a hard bead, you can't crush it. It's insoluble in water and it will show you none of these tests. So that is a lot of excitement for the students. Then the biggest excitement come when you observe these fibers in the microscope. So what we have shown here is a cotton fiber as observed under a very low resolution microscope. If you go to high resolution, the word becomes even more colorful. But even at a low resolution, cotton fiber is a characteristic that it turns and folds less like paper, whereas any synthetic fiber will not show that. And in fact, we had a lot of excitement even in our staff also because we have been doing a lot of activities for many years. But now we can start to differentiate between natural cotton, which comes from the plant, the processed cotton, which is used for medical applications, different kinds of cotton, even in cotton in fabric, we have a lot of kind of materials which we wear. And we also try to connect these two social aspects of productions of fiber. So now when we went to the school, so we did this activity in four schools, Kendra Vidyalaya Colaba, Kendra Vidyalaya Ambar Nath, Navode Vidyalaya Silvasa, and Atomic Energy School 5 in Anushakti Nagar. Now, this involved working with microscope and burning them. We have a lot of fear about giving things to students. So in this thing, one part was that you have to prepare slides on which you have to mount a fiber. And the fiber you have to extract from a thread. Even the very fine thread you see has hundreds of fibers. So you have to unwind the fiber, pull out threads, put it on a slide, and put cover slip. And we usually feel that children are going to mess it up. But here you can see the meticulousness of children. I wouldn't do clean every slide when I do it in my lab. But these children knew that cleanliness of slide is very important. These were using microscope for the first time. They had never seen a microscope before. So it is amazing. You can see the care they are taking in preparing the slides. They have never done it. We did not give them detailed instructions. It's by their own intuition. Observation, of course, it's excitement. Seeing it under the microscope, everything looks so different. And most importantly, what we usually don't ascribe to the children is that they can think independently. And we were very happy to see that they were arguing about the observations. That what they observed, what it means. And our greatest pleasure came when in one of the classes I was taking it, we said that you just need to test the natural fiber ash because that is the only thing which will react with water. The synthetic fiber bead is not going to dissolve in water. But the students demanded proof. They said do it in front of us, otherwise we are not going to believe this. And they insisted it. I mean, I was very happy at the insistence, which means that they understand intuitively the idea of control, the necessity for doing negative experiments to say that there is a difference. Not just because the teacher has said, even though we don't give them opportunities, but they know that I will not trust unless I see the other result. Second thing we observed was that their observation skills were much sharper than ours. For example, many times if I'm burning a small piece of fiber, I'm not able to distinguish between the smells, subtle smells of two fibers. But we had many young children immediately saying, oh, this smells like burning plastic and this smells like burning paper. I was amazed. Even at that point of time, being very close to this experiment, I couldn't spot the differences, but they could. So I think they are much ahead of us in some of the skills which we need for doing good science. And of course, the wonder of science, that threads everyone is handed, but nobody even looked at the thread and say, oh, it consists of so many fibers. In fact, there is a lot of misinterpretation about thread being fiber and fiber being thread. And most importantly, some of them directly appreciated that, okay, we have read about this activity, but we never did it. You know, once we have seen it, now we'll never forget. So that was a great appreciation for us. The next activity, which my colleague Dipti will talk about is about leaves, the variety in leaves. So different kind of leaves, collecting different leaves, putting in a file is a project, I think almost every school does. Also, we have mass activity in which you use leaves to measure the area of these things. But so here we are doing something which is there in their books, which many of them are already exposed to, what is the process which we are getting into and I think Dipti will elaborate more. Thank you, Ankush. Now, this activity with the leaves, we define it as a activity, which is local context activity. Now, local context activity has been particularly designed to encourage students to engage with their surroundings and learn from their environment. We used diversity in leaf forms as in their size, shape, and color to convey the idea of variation in nature. And how this diversity may be related to the local climate of the region. So what we did, we collected different types of leaves. Ideally, we would have liked to take out the students in their school grounds and observe the vegetation and collect the sample themselves. But given the rainy season, we are not able to do that. However, we collected different types of leaves. We had around 15 to 20 different types of leaves which were given to the students. This entire activity was done in a discussion mode where students were initially engaged by asking them to observe. Simply observe, we ask them, what do you observe in these leaves? Do you see similarities or you see differences? Students were able to relate to the differences in the leaf. Most of them mentioned that they are different in size, shape, and color. Then we went on to ask, do you think that the difference in the leaf size somewhere affects the function of the leaf? Even though the students, most of the students were fairly familiar with the function of the leaf, but a direct relation with the function of the, with the area of the leaf versus the function of the leaf wasn't there. But we built this up by discussion. And they could understand that somewhere the area of the leaf does affect the function of the leaf. So then we went ahead further and asked them, so if it affects the function of the leaf, so can we measure the area of the leaf? And how could you do that? So again, we got several ideas from the students. Impropt 2.1 was using a thread. So then we asked them, will it give you the perimeter or it'll give you the surface area? So then they came up with more ideas and we actually went on to use graph paper to find the area of the leaf. This activity was done in groups. Extreme enthusiasm among students was seen. We could see a lot of peer learning. I mean, when in one student understood how to calculate the area of the leaf, they helped out the other students to do the same. And after this entire activity was done, we could see a range of areas. And these students were asked to come up and write on the board, what was the area of their group? That is, each group had one particular type of leaf. So one student representative from each group came and wrote down the area of the leaf. So once they could see that there was a diverse range of areas which they were getting, we extended the idea further and we asked them, do you think since you're getting this entire range of areas in the leaf, is it somewhere related to the climate of the region that you're staying in? What kind of a climate does Mumbai have? Again, this was built up by discussion and students were able to relate the diversity in leaf area to the tropical climate of Mumbai. And somewhere they could understand that since there is no scarcity of natural resources in a coastal area and a tropical region climate with respect to sunlight and rainfall, so we could see an entire range of leaf diversity areas. Then we tested it further. We asked them, if you were to move to a different climatic zone, for example, a contrasting one of dry-hot climate, would you be able to see a similar range of diversity in areas? Now this sparked a very interesting debate. Now we had two clear groups in the class. One said, since it's a dry-hot climate, higher transpiration rate would require a larger leaf area. On the other hand, we had students know the transpiration rate needs to be low, so the leaves should be spiny and smaller in size. So we asked both the groups to justify their answers. And again, this was built out by simply debate and argumentation that they reached a consensus by discussion. Of course, we do hope when this activity is extended across India, and they are actually able to compare the quantitative data that starts to pour in from the different regions of the country, they'll be able to build a much more meaningful understanding of this particular activity. It was extremely satisfying to see that students were able to link a concept of biology, learn a quantitative skill, link them together to the local environment. And we had immense feedback from students. They were extremely enthusiastic in participation of this activity. I now invite my colleague, Rohini, and she will talk about how a familiar activity like curd making can be used to teach scientific method to children. Thank you. Thank you, Deethi. So this activity is called Will Milk Always Curdle, and it was done in Jawahar Navoda Vidyalaya Silvasa and K. V. Mankurd. So this activity involved curd formation in the presence of various conditions. So curd formation is a long known practice. Students also know that it is how curd is being formed. It is a bacterial activity. They also know that it is lactobacillus, which plays a role in the formation of curd. But what this activity also told in addition was that bacteria require optimum conditions of temperature and pH. To some extent, students could also understand the idea of antibiotics, and most importantly, the importance of controls and variables in an experimental design. So this is the experimental design where we dispensed equal amount of milk into six beakers. Except for the negative control, we added equal amount of curd to all the beakers. And here we had four different conditions. So one to one beaker we added antibiotic. The other was heated to a really high temperature. The third one was kept at a low temperature. And the fourth one we added baking soda to introduce an alkaline condition. Since there are antibiotics and chemicals involved in this experiment, our instruction particularly mentioned that this activity be carried out only in the presence of a teacher and none of the contents of the beakers were to be tasted by any of the students. So since curd formation takes a very long time, after the additions, we engage the students into a discussion, and we make them predict the outcomes of each of these beakers. So will curd formation occur in any of these? And if yes, then how fast or how slow will it happen? Interestingly, students were involved in discussions and arguments, and they were able to come up with some predictions. We had to end the activity at the end of four hours because of time constraints. But four hours are not enough to obtain real thick curd. Interestingly, students demonstrated fine skills of observation, where they were able to tell which of the beakers was thicker or which of the beakers smells stronger compared to the others. So they were able to make a comparison of all of the experimentals with the positive and the negative control. They were also able to identify the factors which promote or prevent bacterial activity. So they were able to understand that here, curd is a source of live bacteria. And this was a testimony of relevance. Curve formation is a very, very common practice to us, but some of the comments took us by surprise. When one of the students said that I had never added, tried adding anything to milk and observing it in this way. Another one said, I wonder what will happen if I add lemon juice to milk? So the idea of playing with something as simple as milk or curd has actually brought about a lot of curiosity in learning biology. Some of the teachers remarked, saying that now I know why the milk in the tetrapac doesn't curdle so easily. So everybody was able to make an association of this activity with our everyday life. And certainly most of the students felt that they could try the activity again. So we saw that milk may not always curdle. And now we'll see how earthworms were caught and kept alive in a teacup and I invite Meena for the same. So from the title it may seem that a little bit, can you find out there are some things mentioned as earthworm makes earth in a cup. Can it do that? And can we keep earthworms without earth? So it may seem counter-intuitive, but can we use this counter-intuitive ways of thinking to learn science? And we, under the program of CUBE that is Collaboratively Understanding Biology Education, we use model organisms to do biology along with school and undergraduate students. So using the model organisms, keeping them alive, what all concepts we can connect. So we are kind of remodeling the classroom and lab engagement. And we try to bring in the context to the concepts that are learned in school biology. So through just observing earthworm and keeping them alive, we can touch upon concepts or we can learn concepts of ecology, habit and habitat of earthworms. Simulating a culture in a cup or in any artificial medium is nothing but creating a live habit and habitat. And by earthworm, using earthworm what all we can read from the school biology is that we can touch upon the concepts of nutrition, what all things that earthworm feed on in the soil. Then how does the respiration of gases, the exchange of gases takes place and we compare it with humans and other organisms. And then this is of course a continuation and year long activity. So what all can be done using, when we say that we have to model, create a model organism or simulate a culture, live culture. So you find earthworm from your locality and then prepare a cup culture, sort of. It's called cup culture because it's just made in a plastic cup or any kind of small plastic or any medium you can use. And then what all we do, because the activity says can earthworm be kept alive without earth. So we are using tissue paper which is an alternative for cellulose that is, which is found in the earth. So we use tissue paper and then you can see here these are the alive earthworms and then keep several cup cultures in a water bed which requires not much of work as for maintenance level. We just keep it in the water bed and then earthworm will degrade the cellulose. So degradation of cellulose can also be understood through this cup culture. And this is in the cube lab, we have several cup cultures and then earth it's, I mean earthworm has converted the sort of tissue paper into soil kind of thing. So all this can be is being done in cube lab. So can it be reproducible in classrooms and we are doing this activity in the classroom? So what all we did? We had a discussion through inquiry where can you find earthworms? So students were giving up answers that of course because it's now rainy season we can see it in the wall under the plants, et cetera. It's very prevalent nowadays. So what do they eat? They said that they eat soil, they live in soil because they eat soil. But we need to make them understand what is there in the soil? So because of the foliage of leaves, woods and twigs and what nutrition can you get from there? It's basically cellulose. So cellulose is the medium that can be required to feed on earthworms. So how do they breathe? How do they get energy from cellulose? Where do they get protein? So all these question answers came up through inquiry in the classroom itself. And what all we did as a hands-on thing, we asked them to prepare cup culture. We gave them cups and then some tissue paper and then created a model of the cup culture. Everybody did in the group in the classroom itself and the challenge was then for them was we asked them to collect earthworms, say around three to five, and maintain in the cup and keep it alive for at least one or two weeks. So that requires follow-up, of course, and it will be continued activity. And these are some exciting pictures from the classroom itself. So it generated curiosity. You can see here students are preparing cup cultures. Everybody has prepared some kind of, prepared cup cultures in groups and then they are doing some observations, et cetera, as a blackboard activity. Okay, so the next presentation is about unpacking the logic behind congruency triangle and Shweta is going to tell you more about it. Thank you, Meena. And hello students, I'm presenting your work. So this activity, our purpose behind this activity was students learn many concepts of mathematics in their middle school curriculum. But there is very few opportunities for them to access the logic behind it. So this activity was designed so that they unpack what is the logic behind congruency test. We tried this activity in three schools, Kendra Vidyalai Kolaba, JNV Palghar and ACS-5, so around with 90 students. The objective of the activity was to investigate what is the minimum data needed to reproduce or to construct a congruent triangle, to a unique or a same triangle and unpack the logic behind it. We believe that students at the end of this activity will learn that there are three independent measures needed to construct a unique triangle. They'll learn to form conjectures and they will verify and refute them either through constructions, through counter examples or through gestures and other verbal arguments. We also believe that they'll extend this understanding for congruence of other polygons. So what was the activity? So in the activity, we began by giving either one measure or two measures to students and asked them to construct a triangle, which means we either gave them one side, two sides or one side and one angle and we asked all of them to construct a triangle. Once they constructed it, we asked them to check whether any of you got the same triangle, whether your triangle are congruent. So none of them got the same triangle because the control conditions were only two and two conditions were not letting them to confine a unique area. So then we asked them to conjecture about what minimum conditions you need to confine a unique area and we contextualized this problem in the sense that we asked them that you have a triangle in your head and you want your friend to construct exactly same triangle. So how will you tell this to your friend? So because of this friend context, they were very expressive and you could see in a while that how they wrote answers, made conjectures. Later they verified and disproved these conjectures either by actually making constructions or coming up with examples. Here is one example. I would like everyone's attention here that this is side, side and angle which has been refuted here. So you can see both the triangle has three centimeter, three centimeter side, four centimeter, four centimeter side and same angle and given that the two triangles are not congruent. So it's not only that minimum three conditions but which three conditions is what students also started figuring out. Later they also extended this activity to quadrilaterals and in some schools, yeah some of you are smiling, I can see that you also did for pentagon and hexagon, other thing. So out of 90 students that we worked with, 50 students actually made meaningful conjectures. Everybody made conjecture, the other conjectures were more pragmatic. They were not mathematical in the sense or they were funny sometime because students also liked to tell something funny to their friend. And more than 30 such conjectures were actually verified or disproved. There was a lot of collaboration happening or some people preferred to work alone also. We allowed them to use, make use of any language that they are comfortable with and the reasoning here you can see it came in Marathi in some places in Hindi, English and whenever required it was also in the tabular form. So these are some responses. I will highlight couple of responses from this. So this sort of represents the most common correct conjecture and the wrong conjecture. So this first one that giving three angles will reproduce will make a unique triangle was a very common wrong conjecture that student made and they also disproved it later and giving three sides will give a unique triangle was the most common correct conjecture that student made which they also proved why it will do that. There were also a different kind of reasoning, very Euclidean kind of reasoning that we saw in students. For example, for ASA where one side is fixed and two angles are fixed, student gave a very much reasoning that is given in the Euclidean textbook that if the side is fixed and the two angles are fixed it is going to confine a area and it's going to create a unique triangle and that student also managed to convince to the entire class. I want to highlight this table. This table is giving sides of the polygon and the minimum conditions needed to make a unique congruent constructions. You won't find this table in any school textbook or even in college textbook. This is a correct table made by student. So what students did was they found out by construction for triangle and for quadrilateral and then they conjectured for the remaining polygon. So here some of the students actually looked at the pattern and also made wrong conjectures by looking just at the difference. But this correct one and many other correct one they what they did was they realized that each polygon could be triangulated. Each polygon could be triangulated and hence we can use the understanding of triangle to find the minimum condition for each polygon. And we believe that mathematically this performance is very important and the way students made conjectures, the way student tried to prove it, disprove it, convince it sort of created a mathematical access for them in the maths that they available in the textbook. And we hope to investigate further. My core teachers are there in the audience or they'll wave hands if students have questions. So that's all. Now, speed. So speed is a very intuitive concept but when you start to quantifying it it has some puzzles, some surprises and my colleague Pritesh here will talk more about it. Thank you, Shweta. So I will be talking about the physics activity which we had in the following schools. KV Ambaranath, JNV Palgar and KV Manchur. So this activity was related to understanding motion graphs and relating it to the real life situations. The activity was mainly in English but we did interact with the students in Marathi and Hindi so that language is not a barrier. And they can understand and they can give their replies and their reasoning in the language which is convenient for them to state the answers. So the objectives that we kept in mind and we wanted the students to understand and learn at the end of the activity was understanding and interpreting graphs. Then we wanted them to understand graphically because graph being one of the central concepts in physics we wanted them to understand and interpret graphs. And the third most important thing is we always talk about ideal things in physics. We wanted them to understand and relate this to real life situations and take out science from data that they collect. So I will describe the activities more. Before that let me tell you about the prerequisites. So we had checked that class eight students are familiar with graph plotting. They understand how to draw axis, how to make scales and things like that. They are also familiar with the definition of speed and definition of distance. So these definitions are already taught to them. We made sure while making this activity that there is no much infrastructural burden on the schools and we made sure that whatever is available can be used to do the activity. So the activity now, the activity was divided into two parts. In the first activity we wanted the students to analyze a graph, a motion graph. The graph which is shown here, a distance time graph which is a piecewise linear graph of an object moving in a straight line on a flat path. The students had to answer few questions which check their concepts about the direction of motion and the concepts of speed and distance. So here we had made groups. So we gave the activity and then asked the students to interact with their neighbors and come up with the answers. So basically they have to calculate the slopes and find the speeds. We are talking only about speeds here and that should be noted because at one point we saw that even the students saw that the speed is negative. So what the negative sign means, we had not expected this but many of the students did understand that the negative sign means the object is actually traveling in the opposite direction and this was a surprise to us and many of the students did understand this. Next was more about real life thing. So we all know about Usain Bolt and we were very happy that all the students knew about Usain Bolt. They knew that he is a sprinter who has made various world records in 100 meters race and they also knew the time that he took. That was 9.5 seconds to complete 100 meters. So this activity was related to Usain Bolt which was the central to the entire physics activity. So we had given the students two graphs which you can see here. These graphs have labeled X axis which is time in seconds but the Y axis is not mentioned. The students in their activity sheets had the data of Usain Bolt's 100 meters distance to time data and they had to identify which graph corresponds to distance and which graph corresponds to speed. Again they had to interact with each other. They had to go back and forth to check how the data is related to this graph, how the speed is going to change, how the distance is going to change. Will it constantly change when the person will speed up, when this person will speed down and all those things and many of them quickly came up with the argument and gave answers and here is one such response. What we found out is that students do understand what exactly the data means. They did interpret the graphs. They gave correct answers almost always but the problem was at times they were unable to put that into words and that was perhaps the issue which we saw. So we would like to work on that, like how to reason what they see. The next part was the most interesting part and everyone was very much enthusiastic because we all know that the physical training period in schools is the most interesting period because we go out of the class and have fun. So here you can see a video. I will quickly explain what exactly is happening here. So the activity is as follows. Like Usain Bolt, students had to run for 100 meters. One of the students, she ran for 100 meters and at 10 meters distance along the 100 meter track, there were other students. So this was a group activity of 12 students. One of them would run, one of them would be the Usain Bolt and other students had stopped at 10 meters distance. All the students were given stopwatches. These stopwatches were synchronized and they had to stop their time, stop their watch exactly when the runner passes by. So now they have data at the end of the race. They have data for all the 10 points and they can go ahead and plot this graph which is the distance versus time graph. Now you can see it is up to 40 because at times we had to shorten the distance because it is rainy season. So we did this in a corridor. So this is just a 40 meter thing. And the interesting thing was we could take the data, we went to the classroom back, back to the classroom and then we asked them to plot this data. Many of the students did that correctly. In some cases there were problems about finding the scale, how to, what should be the scale on the x-axis, what should be the scale on the y-axis where we had to intervene. Also they, they drew the graph very well and then they, we asked them to compare it with Usain Bolt's graph. And then find out where are the differences? What is the problem with an amateur running and a professional running? And they could easily figure out that here speed is decreasing, here maybe speed is increasing. So I should run faster during this part and slower during this part, maybe something like that. We also wanted them to go ahead and see how schematically you can come up with a speed time graph and check it with Usain Bolt. When is he speeding? Is the speed remaining constant? And when is he slowing down? So overall by the end of the activity we expected the students to interpret these graphs, to understand these graphs and then collect data and then plot graphs. So data collection, which is a very important and then data analysis, which is a very important part of science and physics. So this was, we wanted to demonstrate and show that to students. And then again comparison of this data with previously available data. So that was the physics activity. Thank you. I will hand over the stage to Ankush sir. Thanks Pritish. So you had a glimpse at some of the activities which some of us did in the schools. In fact, it was a lot of taxing because we had to pull everyone's, tell them to stop whatever they are doing and go to schools and do these activities. And in fact, our greatest reward in this whole process was that we got invitations, particularly from students directly, that they said that, okay, please come again. And they themselves started making schedule once you should come. In fact, that, I mean, it's without consulting their teachers and principals, they said, okay, no, this period is going to be free in this week and you can come. So the kind of enthusiasm was surprising because we hadn't imagined. I mean, there's always anxiety that, how will they receive, they might find it too boring and all. In fact, what made it, in fact, we have been reflecting that what are the elements we need to inculcate to bring in this culture. I want to relate one incident. I was in one of the J&Vs and we were trying to open up the sessions. So we want to talk, make every student talk, express so that they break the ice. And I know that some particular students are very silent. I felt that maybe they don't understand English. So I tried to talk in Hindi and even some of our colleagues try to talk in Marathi. I don't know Marathi, but they were very silent. In fact, I tried to ask them very simple question, okay, where do you use threads? Where do you use fibers? And they were, in fact, I would, if I would point out to them, they would feel scared. You know, there's a sense of fear in the students, okay, maybe the teacher will yell at me. I don't know the answer. Whatever I know, is it correct or not? So then I said, okay, let them, maybe they're too scared or whatever. They don't want to be too expressive. But when we started doing the activity, we started burning the fibers. I know two of them. In fact, one of the girl who was the most, looking most scared, you know, she could smell what is burning. And she called me and she insist, like with a very strong force, she said, see, this is where it's smelling like plastic. It was a great surprise because I felt that initially she wasn't sure if whatever I know is correct or not. But now she saw something, she knows whatever she knows is correct. And there was an opportunity, she could confidently tell me that, okay, I know something which I can tell you. So I think we have a lot of notions that our students don't perform, they don't speak, they don't do it. And that is something we need to explore that how can we bring in situations when they feel that they know something and these are the foundations on which we want to build up these activities. The second reward, in fact, came from the teachers because they gave us many insights because they are the ones who are working with these children day in and day out. And they gave us, shared with us the problems and what are the possibilities. And what the most important, in fact, it was a challenge as well as a pleasure for us is that they said that we will extend our full support to you, provided it is making things genuinely better for us. In fact, this was an insistence we got from many teachers because they said there's no dearth of activities for students these days. Government as well as private organizations are keep coming to schools every now and then telling that, okay, we have certain things which will help students. They said, okay, so this is just another activity, I mean, another program which you're bringing to us. It's going to definitely increase there, but I mean, maybe a first, but they say if it genuinely makes a difference, we'll do it. So this was our greatest support. Now I would like to come back to summarize the framework in which the framework of education in which we are trying to collect these activities. So first of all, we want to go beyond the education being just a memorization of sounds and sites of knowledge. Because all we do is look at, we consider book as a knowledge and all we want student to memorize is the sites and sounds of book and whenever we are reading the book. Our activities want to demystify science and mathematics by facilitating what is known as embodied cognition. It's one of the threads of a way of thinking in modern education theory. Embodied cognition means that learning is not just taking place in the mind and mind is not something which is independent of your body. And we see that learning is an integral process which takes place in the mind-body complex. And therefore, the physical movements you are doing while you are learning something, the kind of sites, the kind of sounds, the kind of smell you associate with a concept, make a concept more real. And makes learning which is embedded in your whole self. Secondly, we want to nurture observational and measurement skills. See, many of us who have not gone through any formal or non-formal education are aware of a lot of things which are around us. But what formal education tends to do, it wants to sharpen what we call as observation and measurement skill. And these are the processes which give form to knowledge and whenever a knowledge takes form, the knowledge can be further used to solve a problem. The third idea is necessitating the process of reasoning and seeking evidence. In fact, the niche as my colleagues showed that the activities demanded the students to reason and student did reason. I would like to point to you a big difference which why it makes. See, many of the reasons students gave are not identical to what are the accepted correct notions. But in fact, those were the reasons which were given by some of the greatest scientists or greatest inventors in the history. And after a long, rigorous process of experimentation, their reasons, their ideas have been proven wrong. So if the fact that a student is coming with a reason which is different from the correct idea or correct fact does not mean the student is dull, does not mean the student is not learning. In fact, that means the student is actually thinking. And unless that happens, we cannot nurture talent of science in students. And if I want to differentiate science education from other disciplines or other ways of knowing things, this process is what makes science different from other forms of knowledge acquisition. And fourth is that we collect a lot of facts, we collect a lot of data, we collect a lot of impressions from the world around us from daily experiences. But developing a ability to make meaningful conclusion is what is the goal of education. And in fact, this is where we need to reach. And this pre-pilot phase in fact has given us a lot of hope. Even though every school we went, we had a lot of surprises. I can also use the word disappointment but I don't want to use the word disappointment. For example, we see that, okay, maybe the student don't know this. This was taught to them earlier. But that is just the memory part. As I showed you that there were instances in which the students with first interaction we think are the dullest student showed skills, showed the parts of their personalities which are there in this list, which are essence for our activities. And this is where I think our program has a real hope. And we feel that the students, we have real hope in our students also that they can go ahead to make great scientists. So far what I've been doing is giving our impressions of what happened in the schools. Now we would like some of you, the students, the teachers and principals to share what are your impressions. And your impressions may be contradictory to ours. You don't have to actually say good things or say just, you know, okay, it was all good. So whatever you felt that what are your impressions we would like you to share because with our audience. So, so as my colleagues have already mentioned, we initially selected 10 schools for our pre-pilot phase. There were five Kendriya Vidyalayas. It was Kendriya Vidyalay, Manchurth, Kendriya Vidyalay, three Kulabha, Kendriya Vidyalay, Amarnath, Kendriya Vidyalay, Lonavada, and Kendriya Vidyalay, Silvasa. Then there were three JNVs. There was JNV Pune, JNV Silvasa, and JNV Palghar. And two ACS schools, ACS school number five in Anushinagar campus, and also ACS school number three in Palghar. Sorry, school number two in Palghar. These 10 schools we went, spoke with students, teachers, principals for our initial data collection. Then due to lack of time, we could conduct activities in some of these schools, like we conducted two activities in this school, two activities in some other school, and so on. So we, today morning I was talking to different students and we asked them which activity was done in your school and what did you like. So I got some very interesting responses. So I would, if the students want to raise their hands or to students or teachers and talk about it, we can start with that. Just introduce yourself and then. Myself, Someshur Asadkar, Digital Science, JNV Palghar. What earlier we are doing time, distance time graph. In roadside, we measured the distance, 200 meters. At the same time, vehicles are running, bicycle, track, jeep, buses. And we are giving the formula, speed, distance, time into graph. So they calculate the distance. In seconds, we convert them into kilometer per hours. How the Bhagat Singh, they are blasting the Bharuta and all these things. So they got the idea about the distance, from distance time graph, how to calculate speed. I would like to tell the students one thing, that you don't need to think about the language. If you don't want to speak in English, you want to speak in Hindi, in Marathi, you can also speak in that language. My name is Pratik Ramnath Patel. I am from JNV Palghar. The sir taught us physics, distance, time, which we had to learn from activities. We learn from teachers, we learn from studies, we think in our mind. But he taught us from activities, which we could understand very well. And distance, time, distance, graph or time graph, speed graph, we could understand them very well. And how we can use them in our daily life, he also taught us. And he also showed us the activity, which we could learn very quickly. Thank you. Thank you. Fibers activity was done in JNV Silvasa. Is there somebody from JNV Silvasa, who would like to talk about? There is a mic over there. My name is Adarsh Malhi. I am from JNV Silvasa. We had done Fibers activity here. So, we had a science test. So, we had a Fibers test in it. So, we had to write a test with so many properties. But one day before that, you come here and do these activities. And we get to know so much about Fibers and Fabrics, which we may not be able to understand without you. Thank you. Leaf activity was connected. Number of schools, one of them was KV Lonavlap. So, is there somebody from KV Lonavlap, who would like to say? Good morning, everyone. My name is Sakshi. I was very happy to see that some teachers came to our school who told us how to remove the leaf area. And I think so that it's necessary to all that know how to find the area of leaf. And actually, they also taught us that what does a leaf contain? Like chloroplast, chlorophyll, stomata, et cetera. Thank you. Thank you. What else do you have? Hi, I'm Weber from KV Manchurd. We had an activity based on curd formation. We learned the curd was formed under certain conditions, such as presence of bacteria, no contains of antibiotics, certain heat temperature, et cetera. We were divided into several groups. There were 12 groups in our class. Each was given a beaker and milk and curd. But some group was given an antibiotic. Some was given baking soda, et cetera. Then we conducted the test, and we had a lot of arguments, such as whose tube was the curd formed. Thank you. Thank you. Earth form activity was conducted in one school that was ACS Phi. I think some students from ACS Phi are also here. Can there is hand or yeah? Hello, my name is Prenu, and I am from ACS Phi. In our class, how can earthworm survive in the plastic cup? It was shown. And some teachers came and shown us how can we keep earthworm as pets in our home. We used some plastic cup and tissue paper to survive earthworm. And we know that tissue paper has cellulose, which is the food of earthworm. Yeah, that much only. Thank you. And maths activity was done in a number of schools. Any would like to volunteer? Yeah, here. Hello, I am Himachal from JNV Palghar. Maths activity is held in our Vidyalayam to show the congruence of triangle. It is a very delicate activity done by the communication of the students. It proved that the minimum requirements to draw the congressite triangle. It teaches how to draw congruence triangle via the minimum information. It teaches a lot about congruence of triangles. Thank you. Thank you. Anybody else would like to say anything from teachers or principals? Or yeah? Good afternoon. My name is Saroj Kumar Dalai from TGT ACS Phi, Mumbai. Sir, I have a question for you. Have you studied natural fiber? Have you burnt it? After burning it, it is ash. It is said that these are alkali in nature and these are metal oxides. Fiber, cellulose, they are made up of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. And where metal comes? Have any students asked you this question? This question did not come. This question did not come. So you tell me. Because plant fibers are made from cells, living cells, in fact. And living cells, usually the predominant material is cellulose, which makes the cell wall. But within it, there are a lot of proteins. And proteins come. Proteins are made up of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen. But proteins also have metals in them. So many proteins have metal, which is a part of the protein structure, although not in very high concentrations. And even as a part of cell material, there are, I mean, usually when we study them, we see them as a micronutrient. Fibers are not proteins. Fibers are cellulose, no? No. Predominantly, there is cellulose. See, probably for plants and animals, we read about their mag. There is something which makes up about 70% to 80% of the mass. Metals are there present about 0.5%. It's a very small percentage. It's not a major component. But it is there. Like even in our body, we have major and micronutrients. So it is a micronutrients also. Sir, it won't come in small quantity, right? OK, you do it. I think the best proof is not me convincing. But you try it out and do tests of metals. In fact, this will be a very interesting activity. You collect that ash. And there are several laboratory tests for metals. So we can actually extend that activity, even for senior classes. Thank you. Sir, myself, PGD chemistry is Janmipune. I would like to reflect on this question. Actually, the first important source for alkalis is plant only. Because first, alkali, that is, all collies, is sodium hydroxide is obtained from plant. So they also contain metals. And these metals can be converted into metal oxides when you are going to burn it. So they give you the basic test. It is correct, sir. Thank you. Sir, ma'am, Vidant Tripathi, from easiest to Tarapur. Sir, you and Matski, ma'am, have told that AA criterion for congruency of triangles, if it proves wrong, then why is our NCRT or CBSE books printed there? Thank you for your question. What is your name? Vidant. So, the criteria for AA, maybe the rest of the people would like to know, shows the similarity of the triangle. Both the triangles are similar. But congruent, we call them, if we put them on top of each other, then it will match exactly. So, in AA, we did not come to your school, sorry. But the children had made diagrams like this, in which there are three angles in two triangles, but one is small and one is very big. So, this is possible. So, you do it. You keep the three angles the same, but keep the sides separate. So, you will know that triangles are similar, but not congruent. And in the NCRT book, it is just similar. It is congruent, not written like this. Last two comments, yeah. There is somebody there. Myself Karuna from ASTS to Tarapur. I am very happy to come here and to be enlightened. Even my students will be very happy, just now he asked one thing. We were not that privileged, because we did not have any activities of this kind. But sure, now when we go, we are going to show all of these. And we expect you people to come soon to our school. Just now, they were talking about metals, present in fiber. I just want to ask whether that metal, will it make any difference in the quality or texture of a fiber? Yes, it does. And that is one of the reason. In fact, in addition to metal, there are also silica. So, in fact, that is why cotton, when you, raw cotton, when you touch, it's very rough. And when you, there's a bleaching process. The process cotton in which the metals dissolve away. And that's when cotton becomes softer and softer. So, in fact, there are, there is a, nowadays process cotton, which feels like silk, in which most of the metals have been removed. So, metals play a big role in the way fiber feels on your body, its reaction with sweat and all. And in fact, there's a problem in the spinning industry, that if you take the raw cotton and it spins on the wheels, it erodes away the wheel. Because the metal is very strong and it acts as abrasive. But after you bleach it, and if you spin it, then the machine doesn't get corroded. So, there's a lot of, if we should get into the fiber processing, there are a lot of ways. In fact, some of these we can very easily demonstrate in a class also. I mean, yes, so, yes. So, some of it, in fact, I had learned during a forensic science course in, when I was doing my PhD. And some of it, in fact, we discovered while doing this also. So, it was both. But yes, in fact, these gives us opportunity to learn and polish our skills also. So, thank you. Last call. Am I audible? Yes. Good afternoon to all the dignitaries here on the dais and dear teachers and dear children. Actually, I am privileged, I am Mrs. Sunita Arram from JNV Palgar, TGT Mathematics. And our school is really privileged to have a session on Vigyan Pratiba. The success of this program, if you want to know, just see the beaming faces of the students when you left the campus. I would like to congratulate the team of mathematics team that I was there with the Haritha Mishwas there, Tuba Mishwas there. The students were really, really very happy to do the activities on their own. So, I think that this program, Vigyan Pratiba will bring the classroom teaching of mathematics to the practical level. And as far as master Vedant Triphati he asked one very beautiful question, why this AAA criteria is being printed in the test book? So, it's not for congruency, it is for similarity. And the best example you can have is construct different types of equilateral triangle. That is the best example you can take. And I really, not only me, all the staff of JNV Palgar as well as the students are waiting for the next session on Vigyan Pratiba. So, thank you so much. Sure, we will come to the schools soon and yeah. Myself, Jini Jimmy, I'm TGT science of K.V. Selvasa. Not beyond all this, no, nothing activities is done in our school, just data collection was done. But my thing is that if we want to just furnish all these things in students, in each class there are different levels of students, different levels of students and we are getting 40 minutes time for this. So, for this, now all the activities that you have been made them to do, I saw that this is two hours, am I right? Yes. This is two hours. So, for that, 40 minutes class it's not possible to complete these topics in this, doing this all this activity. Because for us, teachers, it has been similarly given according to split up of syllabus, we have given the split up of syllabus that we have to complete the course in time. We agree with that observation. Post lunch, we will have a meeting with some of you. We will discuss all these issues in that meeting. Fine. Just. As Madam raised the question, actually I could remember my time when I was in class 11th. My teacher was Dr. Vikya Grawal. He was demonstrating so many things and we used to go to lab and what was the difference only? Within the 45 minutes, it was the class was 45 minutes in my school. So, what he is doing, only the demonstration was same, everything was same. Only the difference was, he was not demonstrating this is happening. He was just telling what and why it is happening. He was demonstrating different way and asking the question from students only. This was the difference and it makes lots of difference that we can manage within the timeframe. Thank you. Okay. So, as I said, we will have meeting with some of you post lunch, but since. Just one thing I would like to add here is that the mistakes which students do or the wrong notions which we do are the real learning opportunities. In fact, we want students to do more mistakes because that is when we can, I mean help them learn more. So, I just want to emphasize that and that is a very important part of this program. Okay. Since we are behind schedule, we will stop here. I would like to end with a formal vote of thanks. We would like to thank, first of all, Dr. Shekhar Basu for sparing his valuable time and coming to inaugurate this project. Also, director TFR, Professor Sandeep Trivedi. Our colleagues from SINP who arranged a parallel program there. Dr. Mohanthi was director there and also Professor Amit Ghosh. As various speakers said, this discussion for this project started from top levels of government. Dr. Basu took a lead and but there were also inputs from other S&D secretaries from time to time. We will specially like to mention Professor Vijay Raghavan from Department of Biotechnology and Professor Shwesh Sharma from Department of Science and Technology for giving valuable inputs. Also, other secretaries like Ministry of Earth Sciences and director generals of various departments like CSIR, ICMR, ICAR, DRDO who had been involved in initial planning. Some of these groups, the representatives are present today. Dr. Mahalai, who is representing ICMR. Shigupta, who is representing Navoda Vidyalai Samithi. Dr. Mandal, who is representing Kendra Vidyalai Sanghatan. Dr. Ayangar from Ministry of Earth Sciences. We have also invited our other scientific institutes, representatives, Mr. Umesh Kumar is here who is representing Nehru Science Center. Our colleagues from TIFR, Sanjay Bhategaugar, our TIFRU star, Wing Commander George Antony and Professor Arnab Bhattacharya was here earlier. I can't see him in the audience now. Also, after the first draft of the project was prepared, Dr. Bhasu constituted a committee of representatives from different BAE Institute to give inputs on the project. Professor Amit Ghosh from SIMP was there. So was Professor Biju Shekhar from Institute of Physics Bhuvaneshwar, Professor Dilip Jatkar from HRI Allahabad and Professor Amalujan from Institute of Math Sciences Chennai. We thank all of them. We also thank all the participating schools, their principals, their teachers, the students and the higher authorities of the Kendri Vidyalai Sankhatan, Hatham Karnachi schools and Navadavidyalai Samiti for giving their support. Then we come to our own center. We have to start with Director Dean. We had a core committee of few faculty members drafting and redrafting the proposal and going through various iterations, making suggestions, all the core committee members. Then our former staff members, like our former director, Professor Irwin Kumar, who is not here today, but he also gave a lot of good suggestions. He participated in some of our meetings. Other faculty members, scientific staff, visiting fellows, research scholars, project staff and many of them, as Professor Amit mentioned, put their own projects on hold for last one month to come and help in this. They actively worked in developing the activities. Maybe one person from each group came and presented it today, but there are five or six people involved in each of those groups who worked on developing the activity, redrafting it, then actually going to schools conducting them. There were people who went to all the 10 schools for the collection of baseline data and all the respective faculty members who allowed the staff members to take time from their own projects and work for this. So we thank all of them and like always, this is just the people working on the scientific projects is just one part of the institute, but they have to have to be supported by the admin staff, technical staff of our institute and all the support was provided promptly with we did not face any problems through in this initial part. So we thank all of them and we also thank the members of the media present.