The fundamental ability of being able to read and perform basic operations with numbers is an essential requirement that serves as the cornerstone of all future learning. This acquisition happens when the young learner is between 3-7 years of age, a period known to be critical to brain development. The skills developed in early childhood will create a base for the enhancement of greater cognitive development, socio-emotional skills, reasoning, and more.

Around 260 million children are studying in more than 1.5 million schools across India at present. From these, over 70% of children in Class 3 do not have basic reading and arithmetic skills. Data shows that each year, an estimated 6 million children complete 8 years of compulsory schooling in India with alarmingly low learning levels. Such worrying trends in the formative years of schooling, when the cognitive skill development is the highest, can greatly destabilise a nation.

Without the basic skills of foundational literacy and numeracy, the benefits of all future learning and future success are lost. To truly become a self-reliant nation, India needs to turn the spotlight towards strengthening the existing ECCE programs to highlight foundational learning from the teacher training as well as the curriculum perspective.

Foundational skill development includes young learners being able to:

An investment in quality ECCE to boost foundational learning improves the attainment of the above ‘gateway’ skills, which pave the way for bigger long-term benefits like stronger future learning prospects and employability. Providing foundational skill development across the grassroots levels is an effective equaliser, allowing for inclusivity in early education, leading to better economic gains for the country as a whole aside from improving the learning outcomes of individual children. 

The second-most populous country in the world, India has a high rate of unemployment, a decline which began even before the pandemic hit. A clear long-term growth plan with strong benefits across sectors needs active empowerment of the upcoming Indian youth of tomorrow, right from the foundational stages. The new and improved workforce will find it easier to use new technologies and software, think creatively, adjust to the changing employment landscape, and generally be more accomplished as workers. This well-equipped generation, will, in turn, perform better. Ultimately, the GDP of our nation will reap the benefits of a good early education system. The guiding hands of our country’s economic development, our youth, need to be empowered so they can explore all available opportunities. We can take advantage of the shortage in manpower faced by countries around the world, and use our advantaged and educated youth to fill that gap.

The NEP 2020 is taking steps in this direction, guiding ECCE programs and development towards the goal of a more literate India. 

Foundational literacy and numeracy have been accorded a high priority by the NEP 2020, with the policy stating ‘Strong investment in ECCE has the potential to give all young children such access, enabling them to participate and flourish in the educational system throughout their lives. Universal provisioning of quality early childhood development, care, and education must thus be achieved as soon as possible, and no later than 2030, to ensure that all students entering Grade 1 are school ready’.
Watch India Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi speak about the Indian government’s push towards empowering our nation by increasing initiatives towards early childhood education, below:

Effective implementation of the policy demands wide-scale initiatives, especially training and support for teachers, to help them impart high-quality foundational literacy and numeracy to their charges. These programs also need support from innovative and holistic academic programs for children, right from the foundational stages itself, in order to see long-term benefits. The role of each stakeholder-including institutions, educators, Anganwadis, and even households-needs to be leveraged to develop an integrated and holistic approach to primary education. 

Square Panda is focused on impacting learning and raising a generation of independent confident learners, with our innovative and impactful foundational learning and teacher training programs.

Come back next week for an in-depth discussion about teacher training, and how it affects the implementation of the above mentioned initiatives.

In recent years, a new teaching and learning technique has swept the educational landscape of India, making inroads into the previously predominantly traditional sector. Adaptive Learning, or Adaptive Teaching, as it is called, provides personalised learning via data driven systems, adjusting the path and pace of learning to suit each learner’s needs. Adaptive learning can be divided into two categories, adaptive instruction and adaptive assessment. This technology makes learning more personal, adjusting to a student’s unique needs, offering customised course delivery with technology-assisted insights and analytics.

How Does It Work?

How Does It Help?

Did You Know? Because it is not only transforming the way students learn but how instructors teach, adaptive learning is also known by another name – adaptive teaching. Teachers’ skills are developed via technology to drive learner pathways and re-define learning outcomes. See the benefits…

To Students: 

– An adaptive technology presents students with the appropriate content and learning materials at the right time, increasing engagement.

– Because they are learning at a pace suitable for them, each child is more comfortable while learning, increasing the overall learning outcomes.- The dynamic feedback that allows teachers to cater their teaching style as per the need, and the digital rewards with positive feedback that are offered by the adaptive learning technology, serve to instill confidence in children, particularly struggling students.

To Teachers:

– Adaptive learning arms teachers with deeper insights into areas of struggle for students, while teaching them new pedagogy that aligns with their teaching styles.

– Allows instructors to engage more with students, by reducing the sheer amount of administrative tasks and increasing active learning experiences.

-In pre-primary & primary schools, teachers  often teach students of more than one grade level and different learning levels, in the same classroom. These ‘multi-age’ and ‘multi-level’ classrooms present a unique challenge; how to recognise specific students’ learning needs and then address them, while managing the class simultaneously. Adaptive technology can be used as a tool to teach such ‘multi-age’ and ‘multi-level’ classrooms.

– The real-time feedback adaptive learning provides helps teachers incrementally calibrate their own instructions to meet individual learners’ needs, gradually aligning with the bigger framework of solving foundational learning. This personalised guidance for teachers and educators will help them achieve their goals of a better, more literate India, as envisioned in the new Indian education policy.

To The Government: 

– India has one of the world’s largest education systems ever seen, with more than 1.5 million schools providing education to around 260 million students. Adaptive learning can be changed in size or scale to meet the evolving needs of the entire educational landscape.

– Adaptive software makes assessments possible on both the micro and the macro levels. Real-time dynamic feedback that allows for actionable plans and a mastery-based approach rather than a traditional one-size-fits-all learning model creates a robust education system that can stand up to any global curriculum.

An example of adaptive logic, using Square Panda:
As a child plays and learns on Square Panda’s early literacy platform, activity data is generated. Our adaptive engine picks up this data and decides what content the child should have access to next. Whichever educational game or program the child is learning with reflects this suggestion, only showing content as per the individual child’s learning level. Special ‘cooldown’ periods are built into Square Panda’s platform, ensuring adequate repetition so that children practice without getting bored. Square Panda’s adaptive engine is constantly changing to add more skill masteries, more types of assessments and filters across the games, to tailor learning to specific learner profiles.

Adaptive learning and technology change the way learning happens, and that is a powerful thing. The transformation in the early learning system in India will happen when we embrace adaptive learning, using it as an intrinsic part of early education to enrich the teaching-learning experience.

Stay tuned for more insightful articles that delve into foundational literacy, and other hot button topics from the Indian early education sector.

The 2011 Census states that anyone over the age of 11 who can read and write is ‘literate’. Literacy has been marked as a strong factor in employment, with a study by Bynner, J. and Parsons, S. in 2001, citing, ‘both literacy and numeracy skills have been shown to be crucial in gaining employment and retaining it (…)’. Literacy is the backbone of developing nations like India, and foundational literacy is its base.

Research attributes 80% of brain development to the early childhood period. This fertile period is also when the precursors to language learning are developed. These foundations later become predictors of a child’s reading ability in later grades. Unfortunately, many children (in India and worldwide) are consistently unable to read at their grade level. That is a problem because these children then fall further and further behind with every grade i.e. it becomes tremendously difficult for them to catch up. Not being able to read has grave implications ranging from not getting into college to unemployment.

Why Square Panda Focuses On Developing Foundational Literacy Skills:

The reading skill is crucial to perform well in academics, as well as in regular life. An early reading ability not only influences a future reading habit but also paves the way for future success and quality of life.

The current educational policy has refrained from highlighting any particular mode of instruction as the ‘primary’ mode, choosing instead to leave the decision up to the respective administrations. What is a game-changer for the Indian education system is the addition of ECCE into the new policy. Where once early childhood education was not looked upon as formal education, it is now being given a rightful place in the educational landscape of India. Early education is also at the core of Square Panda’s multisensory platform, with a focus on early literacy.

Square Panda’s mission is to empower all children to reach their full potential by launching their educational journey with the power of literacy and languages and we support that journey through our unique, personalised learning system.

Square Panda wants to drive development and education in India to be on par with our global counterparts, using a platform that enables foundational English language learning, from the grassroots level itself, starting as deep inside the educational system as Anganwadis and Balwadis. With a strong educational team to back the constantly evolving programs developed by Square Panda, we are turning the focus towards training Anganwadi workers to handle early education, work with our systems, and skill themselves, to enable a better learning environment for children at the very heart of India.

The disparity of educational resources across India sees an imbalance in the distribution of basic amenities like teachers, educational materials, and even study books. The gap further widens, due to factors like high pupil to teacher ratios, a lack of appropriate curriculum, infrastructure shortages, poor quality of teaching staff, and declining monetary resources. While there is a facility for free education, especially in the younger years, enforcing this is difficult. Educational technology reaches the places these resources cannot, making edtech companies like ours the perfect collaborators to the government, to enhance foundational literacy across the educational landscape in India. 

“In a country like India, where we find children of different learning levels and capabilities, edtech is a valuable resource to cater to different needs, allowing for a greater personalising and adaptiveness,” opines Mr. Jhalani.

Square Panda’s self-guided adaptive platform allows for an enhanced and holistic early learning experience; the teachers and educators can operate our system with a minimal amount of technical knowledge.

As a future global superpower, we want to see India succeed in its goal to achieve 100% literacy. Square Panda provides an all-round solution to the early literacy problems plaguing the Indian education sector at present, with a blended offering combining digital tools and multisensory physical learning materials.

“The goals Square Panda has is to make education and literacy affordable and reachable to the masses across the world, may it be in China, may it be in India. We want to make sure that every child gets an opportunity to be literate, learn the language of English—which is a primary language across the world—and find better jobs as they grow up.” – Mr. Ashish Jhalani.

Square Panda believes in the need for a robust early education system, along with efficient teacher training programs to enhance quality of education across India, and the globe.

Technology is growing by leaps and bounds, becoming more commonplace in our daily lives as the years go by. In fact, Artificial Intelligence has the potential to add $957 billion, or 15% of current gross value added, to India’s economy by 2035, according to an estimate in a study by a tech giant.

One sector benefiting from technology-the education sector-is yet to see positive results in a country like India. Globally, private investment in educational technology, broadly defined as the use of computers or other technology to enhance teaching, grew 32% annually from 2011 through 2015, rising to $4.5 billion globally.

We’re seeing terms like Artificial Intelligence (or AI) and Machine Learning (or ML) being used very frequently in conjunction with education. We’re decoding these terms, and what changes they can bring to the Indian education landscape, in this article:

What Is ‘Artificial Intelligence (AI)’: It’s also called ‘Machine Intelligence’, and describes the artificial simulation of human intelligence, by machines. Examples of AI include Apple’s SIRI, self-driving cars, Presentation Translator for PowerPoint (it creates real-time subtitles for what the teacher is saying), and more.

What Is ‘Machine Learning (ML)’: A branch of Artificial Intelligence (AI), ML helps systems and software analyze and interpret patterns, by experience and exposure to repeated tasks. ML gets computers to perform tasks without being explicitly programmed for them. Apart from Siri, Alexa, and all the others, ML is used in GPS navigation services, social media platforms (Facebook can recognize a photo of your friend the instant you upload it), the spam filter in your email inbox, and even language learning apps like Square Panda and Duolingo, who use the games and exercises played on their system to calibrate and cater learning as per each individual learner’s level of learning.

“India will have the highest population of young people in the world over the next decade, and our ability to provide high-quality educational opportunities to them will determine the future of our country.” – (NEP, 2020)

We think the new policy by the Ministry of Education perfectly sums up our nation’s future requirements, to create a globally competitive, employable workforce of citizens. For this reason, AI and ML will need to be an intrinsic part of education, right from the early years.

Here’s what we think the future of education will look like, with AI and ML:

Smart Content Will Be Everywhere: Smart learning and smart content include any type of learning that is studied online, including video lessons and recorded classes. Textbooks as we know it will change, with parts or even whole chapters being converted into digital lessons. These new syllabuses will help children of all ages and academic levels, increasing their engagement to a greater extent.

Learning Will Get More Personalized: What we will see as the education landscape changes, is more adaptive learning methods adopted by schools and states as a whole. AI and ML have the unique ability to ‘read’ a child’s data in real-time, and adjust the curriculum to cater to that learner’s particular learning needs. Children coming in the invisible ‘middle strata’ (those who don’t attract attention by being at the top OR the bottom), will not fall through the cracks. Educators will see the benefits of adaptive curriculum, with having to put in extra efforts, which thereby frees up their time for other tasks. Not just learning, but each child’s response and feedback to learning will be personalized too, allowing parents and educators to understand individual children’s performance in detail. Multi-level classrooms, with children of different grades packed into one class with just one teacher, like those seen in rural areas, can make the best use of this personalized approach to learning.

Technology To Support Teachers And Educators: There are multiple instances of AI and ML being used in classrooms across the globe, with varying degrees of success. Not only does the technology get more affordable as time goes by, but it even allows teachers more time to work on lessons and plans, by taking care of all mundane administrative tasks like note making, collating data, etc. that is, for now, a task most Indian teachers have to do manually.
For instance, our early education platform at Square Panda has a ‘Portal’, to help monitor learning in schools and at home, in real-time. Read all about it, here.
All the evidence points towards AI and ML being a strong source of support and aid to educators, and are not to be taken as replacements. After all, education wouldn’t be the same without a ‘human touch’.

An Unbiased Assessment And Tracking System: On account of providing real-time traceability and trackability, AI and ML systems have started to flourish in the edTech segment. Grading and checking will soon be done via a programmed system, removing the possibility of human error and bias with it. Negative feedback will be done away with, increasing a child’s enjoyment of learning, without fear of repercussions.

Increased Reach: India has a vast geography, with multiple remote, hard-to-reach areas; these make equal learning opportunities harder for children in such areas. Technology enables children all over India, especially in the remote areas, to access quality education right from the early years. To make up for the intermittent internet connectivity in such areas, the tech can even be customized to work offline for long periods of time. AI can enable easier access to offline content, and even provide automated tutoring and mentoring programs for different learning styles. The near future could see a greater degree of interlinking and connection between the schools and students, allowing students to take courses and classes that were otherwise out of reach for them. 

Skilling: The performance matrix in AI algorithms helps the machine determine what the child is likely to excel in, while enhancing skills that are applicable in the real world. AI and ML can also help train teachers, skilling them to solve quality issues in the education sector. The enhanced skill set children develop can help them compete on a global level as well.

The education sector in India has predominantly been ruled by human-to-human interaction. With the recent pandemic, this rule is slowly changing, and moving towards a slightly more digital learning landscape. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Intelligence advances are here to stay; educators need to plan for involving digital methods alongside traditional learning, gradually preparing the next generation to leverage the global AI revolution to our country’s advantage.

Interested in adding AI and ML to your teaching? Check out our Square Panda early literacy platform, which uses an adaptive engine to develop early English literacy in young children aged 2-8. As a child plays with our educational games, our software runs in the background, analysing patterns of play, frequency of words played, challenges faced, to suggest letters/words that the child should be focussing on next, inside the games themselves. This data also reflects in our ‘Portal’, allowing educators and parents the ability to monitor progress in real-time.

Stay tuned for our next post, on how we intend to spread early literacy even at the heart of India, and later, another upcoming post where we’ll be talking about how Square Panda is building a safe and kid-friendly ecosystem inside our platform, along with tips to keep every young learner safe while online.

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Mahatma Gandhi (full name, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi), who is also known as the Father of the Nation, was born 151 years ago today, October 2nd, in 1869. 

His contribution to India’s freedom struggle is well-known, but did you know he was equally invested in education in India? 

Mahatma Gandhi On Education In India

Seeing more merit in an education system that was free from British influence, Mahatma Gandhi proposed that schools should begin generating their own income via saleable handicrafts, to become more financially stable. He also believed teachers should have freedom in curricula matters, so they could impart originality to students, rather than sticking to a set format and guidelines. He counted the great Russian writer, Leo Tolstoy, as one of his major influences.

Did You Know? 

Mahatma Gandhi was an avid reader, with a collection amassing more than 11,000 books (a figure he mentions during his interview conducted on July 27, 1933). This collection was later housed at Sabarmati Ashram, as Mahatma Gandhi had relinquished all claim over his books, allowing them to become ashram property.

In 1933, this entire collection was then donated to the municipal library of Ahmedabad, a gesture he made to commiserate with all those satyagrahis whose properties were confiscated by the British Government, as punishment for participating in the salt satyagraha under the leadership of Gandhi.

Gandhi’s eclectic book collection consisted of works from authors like Charles Darwin (Descent of Man), William Shakespeare and Jonathan Swift, to Assyrian satirist Lucian of Samosata (Trips to the Moon), to mathematician James Jeans (Mysterious Universe). Poetry in English, Hindi, and Gujarati also had a space on his bookshelf, including Goethe’s Faust and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. His collection also lists multiple translations in English, Hindi, and his native tongue, Gujarati, of the Bible, Quran, Mahabharata, and Ramayana. Apart from this, Mahatma Gandhi also devoured books that taught him about Zoroastrianism, Sikhism, Buddhism, and Vedanta, among others.

Not only was reading books a way to enrich his mind and philosophies, he also read to become more independent and self-reliant; he read books on childbirth and obstetrics in order to aid his wife Kasturba, when she was to deliver their son Devdas! Other similar books in the quest to prepare himself for varied situations include a guide titled ‘How to Launder‘ and a book called ‘Finger Impressions‘ written by a police officer.

His lifelong reading habit, his attitude of self-reflection, and his writing (he authored many famous books during his lifetime), is what Mahatma Gandhi credits as helping him along the path of self-growth. 

To Commemorate This Great Thinker’s Birthday, We’ll Leave You With Some Of His Quotes On Education:

What have these thoughts by Mahatma Gandhi taught you? Comment below.