MakersBox Foundation Fundraising: Gathering perspectives on STEM Education and Skill Training

What does MakersBox Foundation do?

At MakersBox Foundation, our goal is to make STEM Education and Skill training accessible to the populace that is often denied access to quality education. We intend to do this by opening STEM labs in all Indian States and Union Territories. Through these STEM labs we will focus on creating an environment that focuses not only on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) but also on Culture, Reasoning, Art and Business (CRAB). By creating curriculum that augments primary education and creates opportunities for learning from a Project/Problem-solving based approach, we intend to widen the learners knowledge and equips them with skills that can make them future leaders and problem solvers.

With the current situation, quality education and learning experiences have been impacted, specifically for learners from underprivileged backgrounds. We need your help to understand how these changes have affected your learning experiences.

This would help us answer the following problem statement:

How might we make STEM education accessible to COVID affected students?

What we need from you?

To reach our objective we need to understand the problem from the perspective of someone who is directly affected by it. To do that, you could try answering the following questions:

1. What could MakersBox Foundation do to deliver effective STEM education?

   • The pandemic has impaired the ability to learn in the way we did, gathering in classrooms is not possible now. How can we then take STEM education to people?
   • Try and think of ways in which distance/online learning can be used for STEM learning which, is inherently experiential – Can this be done by delivering learning kits?
   • Inaccessibility to the Internet and devices to access it is a huge problem. How can we go around this problem?
   • Examples of people doing similar work: Insight Walk Foundation fundraising campaign, Insight Walk Foundation Instagram page

2. Personal perspectives on learning/education: Here you could ponder over your experiences learning STEM and Skills. To go deeper into it you could focus on the following

a. Pre-pandemic learning experience:

• How did you learn about STEM before the pandemic?
• What were the key factors that worked for you?
• What didn’t work for you?
• If you could change something about your experiences, what would it be?

b. Learning experience during the pandemic:

• What changed when you had to stop going to school? - What were the effects on your learning?
  c. Post-pandemic learning:
• What kind of changes would you see in the learning experiences of people after the pandemic? - Do you think the way we learn needs to change after things get better and people start going to
  school?
• Do you see in systemic changes that need to happen once things get better?
• Feel free to speculate and note things that you would like to see continuing or changed.

For the second part, it would be great if you can get perspectives from your friends or other people you know, in addition to your own experiences.