GyaNamuna: Virtual platform to connect rural students to quality education

Kathmandu, 7 May (2021) - Group of students and young frugal innovators of Media Lab Nepal Initiative are making their dream of connecting rural students to  quality education come true through the digital education system. The team is leading the project GyaNamuna, which is also the project selected at Open Life Science(OLS) program. Project is trying to help to solve the problems of rural schools like lack of science teachers and practical science teaching. They are experimenting with their model at a primary level school in Pyuthan district in collaboration with the school department, parents of students and local youths. They have already donated necessary materials for connections and platform development.

Prakriti Karki, Mohan Gupta, Ujwal Shrestha and Hirendra Joshi are the core team members who are also struggling to design the syllabus feasible in the rural environment. They are focusing mainly on frugal techniques like building open source and low cost microscopes and mini robots, DNA extraction protocol etc. Prakriti who is also a microbiology student of Tri Chandra Multiple Campus says,” I always thought that biology was a boring subject. Then I knew about the open frugal science movement going around the world through Media Lab Nepal and got an idea to make it more interesting and impactful even in a resource constrained environment.”

In this platform, anyone who is interested to teach the students in their free time can be the contributor. The team is planning to teach the group of both teacher and students to make the project more sustainable and measurable. Students will be taught about several easy innovation techniques linking to their subject to increase their interests towards science. The project will run for 6 months. If this experiment model becomes successful then the team is thinking about expanding a similar model to other rural schools of Nepal.

“This is our dream to create the next generation of scientists from an unheard village of Nepal. We are teaching our little heroes to dream science.”, team says.