The year was 2012. We were intrigued by the happenings in the education technology space. Dr. Sugata Mitra had presented his famous TED Talk on his “Hole in the Wall Experiments” and Bill Gates had spoken about Khan Academy and how it was helping his children learn. Basically, what Dr. Mitra said was if technology is given in the hands of children, especially the one with least access to it, learning is bound to happen organically. Sal Khan had just embarked on his mission to provide world-class education to anyone who wanted, irrespective of where he or she was located. Fascinated and inspired by both these missions, we wanted to try and apply these in our own journey as a Foundation.

Our pursuit of this started at Sree Karpagavalli Vidyalaya, a government-aided middle school in Mylapore, where Mr. Gopalan, the correspondent, encouraged us to try our pilot project. He was brave enough to stop blackboard teaching of Math and allowed the children to learn Math only from the computers in a lab set up by us. Brick by brick, we built the processes around enabling learning and watched the magic happen as their learning outcomes improved dramatically. Within two years, we had four children acing through government talent exams, which enabled them to get scholarships.

Taking our learnings from this experience, we were eager to implement this solution to as many government schools who will willing to subscribe to the philosophy. In a span of six eventful years, we found 30 schools who embraced the process.   What was heart-warming for us was that fact that  big majority of these schools were  located in some of the remotest villages where any kind of access was difficult .  We branded the program “Karka Math Lab” and all the schools showed big improvement in learning outcomes.   

During this journey of seven years, as processes evolved, we have learnt constantly to make the Karka platform more effective with regard to learning outcomes. We have developed our own content and added skills to the learning journey in order to align with almost all the major Indian school board standards. In doing this, we have a small team of people and volunteers who are passionately into content development. We have seamlessly introduced processes inside the labs that facilitate peer learning and time management and foster a sense of self-discipline.

We also got a big amount of validation during this time from our users on the ground, be it school headmasters, Math teachers or, more importantly, students who were excited to come to school because of Karka. The power of the students taking agency was surely visible at various levels, be it students performing so much better at exams, teachers changing their approach or headmasters seeing a surge of new admissions to the government schools in the villages.

We caught the attention of the government too at various levels from the District Education Officer to the Director of School Education. They were highly intrigued by the work we were doing and wanted to expand the Karka programme to more middle schools. We have in place a plan to implement this in one model school in every block in Tiruvannamalai (a district in Tamil Nadu, India) for starters. Work is on in this regard.

All of this experience and happy learnings enabled us to expand our horizons wider and to make the learning platform reach every learner who wants to learn, though our focus will always be on ensuring access to the students from less privileged backgrounds. To align with this dream, we have changed the name from Karka to I Wanna Learn, and that’s where we are today. We hope you connect to this and be a part of our dream in whatever way you can. As a learner or as a contributor.