The Manaloni Manishi Foundation (MMF) has piloted an ambitious Intellectual Empowerment Program (IEP) to help with the personality development of the school and college-going youth. More about this program can be seen here:
Intellectual Empowerment Program
As a part of this effort, we have concluded an 8-week program, in Summer 2021, with 11 middle/high school students helping them expand their intellectual horizons and increase their learning curiosity. While catering for the students’ active participation in presentations, group discussions, and science applications, we also brought in professionals from various fields to talk about how their work relates to some of the concepts students learn in textbooks.
Learning from the success and interest, we wanted to do more. For the next offering of the IEP, efforts are under way to include hands on programming and robotics into the curriculum. The MMF team collectively have seven seasons of experience training elementary and middle school children for the FIRST LEGO League (FLL) competitions in the USA. We wish to use this experience on select underrepresented schools in India in teaching coding skills and also programming simple hardware to perform physical and mechanical functions. Some of these include: a) programming a LEGO EV3 Mindstorms to perform set tasks, b) rig up an Arduino Uno microcontroller to build simple four wheel drive cars from scratch and perform obstacle avoidance during motion, etc.
While we plan to reuse existing EV3s that we have in our possession, we also would like to procure about 10 sets of Arduino kits that come with a variety of sensors. Once the students are able to gain a footing with using these hardware in our IEP sessions, we plan to give them tasks to exercise their creativity in applying what they learned in programming. These exercises will naturally improve their scholastic performance and increase curiosity in practical learning.
The initial cost of this project is Rs. 42,000/- (~ USD 600). We humbly request our donors to help fund the hardware and equipment costs.
Donations in India (preferred)
We prefer taking donations in Indian currency due to various logistical challenges. If interested to fund wholly or partially, please wire money to:
Bank Name: HDFC Bank, Gudivada Branch
Account Name: Manaloni Manishi Society
IFSC Code: HDFC0001986
Account No: 59199160677289
India: +91 91606 77289
Email: admin@manalonimanishi.org
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Donations in the USA
Programming and Robotics
If you are unable to wire money using a bank in India but still want to donate in US dollars, please use the form below.