Agastya International Foundation
Agastya International Foundation ("Agastya"), a public charitable trust registered in Bangalore, India, is a leader in creativity-based education in India. Agastya provides disadvantaged children and teachers access to quality hands-on basic education that awakens their curiosity, and fosters creative thinking, problem-solving and communication skills. Agastya makes learning a) fun and engaging, b) hands-on and creative, c) useful and relevant to the child's current and future context, d) visible and attractive to parents and community members and e) accessible at the village doorstep by the most vulnerable and disadvantaged children. Through innovative Agastya programs, rural children and teachers will acquire the creative energy, learning tools and confidence to overcome their constraints. The Agastya Creativity Lab located at its 172-acre campus in Gudivanka, Andhra Pradesh (near KGF, Karnataka), 14 rural science centers in Karnataka and 50 Mobile Labs have touched over 3.5 million children and 100,000 teachers. Agastya seeks to build on its existing work to lead a transformation in grassroots education for the poor. Agastya believes that such transformation is essential to produce leaders, creators and technologists for an economically prosperous and sustainable society.
Hp Catalyst initiative
HP is building a global network of consortia that is developing more effective approaches to science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education. The goal is to transform STEM learning and teaching, and to inspire students to use their technical and creative ingenuity to address urgent social challenges in their communities and around the world.
The 2010 HP Catalyst Initiative has created five international consortia who will each focus on a specific innovation theme for transforming STEM education:
The Multi-Versity. This consortium investigates and demonstrates new and best practices in online education for STEM students and the professional development of instructional faculty. The long-term goal is to provide students with new learning opportunities from a variety of institutions that can be applied toward certification and degrees.
This consortium will be lead by the Sloan Consortium (USA)
Pedagogy 3.0. This consortium creates new models of teacher preparation that will better equip teachers to facilitate 21st century learning experiences for students. Projects engage new teachers during their pre-service and induction years, plus in-service master teachers, teacher education faculty, and engineering/science content experts and faculty. The long-term goal is to prepare and retain more STEM+ teachers, enhance the STEM+ expertise of master teachers and faculty, and improve student success in pursuing STEM+ degrees.
This consortium will be led by Futurelab (UK)
Global Collaboratory. This consortium enables students to participate in collaborative problem-solving to address urgent social challenges using the power of collaborative grid computing. This theme builds on the HP/UNESCO Brain Gain Initiative.
This consortium will be led by the CSIR Meraka Institute (South Africa)
The New Learner. This consortium engages formal and informal education institutions as they explore how to build a network of learning opportunities for students. The goal is to create new models of student-driven STEM+ learning that are engaging, lead to higher school completion rates, and promote "learning how to learn."
This consortium will be led by the Agastya International Foundation (India)
Measuring Learning. This consortium develops and demonstrates new approaches for using technology to measure STEM+ competencies that are often not assessed in school.
This consortium will be led by Carnegie Mellon University (USA)