“Education does not mean teaching people to know what they do not know, it means teaching them to behave as they do not behave.” –Ruskin Bond

Education is the foundation of contemporary man. It is the first step to awareness. A person in today’s world who isn’t educated can’t survive with affluence. It is the main motto of every national government to educate each and every individual in a country. Most of the developed countries have indeed managed to somewhat accomplish this goal. But India, being a developing nation has been unable to even reach close to this aim. The case here is very different. A vast population of the nation is still illiterate. According to the general definition of the term, a literate is a person who can read, write, communicate and understand at least one language. Taking such a simple criteria, the current literacy percentage of India stands as low as 64.8%. We live in a state Orissa in which the literacy percentage is even lower than the national average standing at 53.6%. Paradeep is a port town and one of the major ports of India. The number of literates around the region is expected to be fairly high. But the plight is that the case here is not much better than that of the rest of the state.

In today’s world, computer education is as important as that of any other subject. Most of our technologies are computer based. In this era if we don’t have computer skills, it’s like daydreaming to think of getting a good job. But even today, there are places where there are misconceptions about computers, where people have just heard about it, not seen it. During the summer vacations, Ankit had gone to his village along with his laptop. People there, were stunned to see such a thing. None of them had the slightest idea of computers. So he discussed his observations with the rest of us and we decided to dedicate some of our time to teach kids of the nearby slums and villages about the basics of computers. Click here to see our efforts on teaching the kids.

SOURCES- Information has been taken from Arihant General Knowledge 2009.

We did our best to teach kids about computers. In total we taught 47 kids who regularly attended every session. Avinash, Ankit and Amartya taught 16, 16 and 15 students each to ensure that every student got equal scope to learn. Deepak assisted the rest while teaching the kids.Our classes started from the 16th of August which was a Saturday. Two of us would teach the students in theory and one of us would take the batch assigned to him for practical classes on every day we taught. As we were able to bring only one laptop, we had to sometimes take two batches in the same day; the first one from 11-12:30 and the second one from 4-5:30 pm. The students were extremely punctual and had the anxiety to gather knowledge. Sometimes in Sundays, we also had a few extra students who were eager to learn. What we taught them included-

1) Basic operation of Ms Words.

2) Ms paints

3) Ms excel

4) Basic computer operations like saving a file, creating a folder, deleting a file etc.

5) We had theory classes on the utilities of Internet.

In total we taught each batch for approximately 41 hours. During the last 4 hours, we took a simple test consisting of about 15 questions in form of a pot-pouri of the topics discussed. We saw that a stunning 36 out of them were able to score above 8 marks. We were pleased to see our efforts successful. We had taught children who, before the teaching sessions had no idea about computers. The original questions were made in Oriya as just a few of them knew English.

Click the tab below to see the questionairre

1) How to start a computer?

2) How to save a file?

3) What do the following shortcuts stand for?

a) Ctrl+ A

b) Ctrl+ C

c) Ctrl+ V

d) Ctrl+ Z

4) How to edit the text?

5) How to open a word document?

6) How to make a graph in Ms Excel?

7) How to edit an existing picture in Ms Paint?

8) How to open and edit a saved document?

9) Match the following-

a) Founder of the internet 1) Google

b) Interconnected network 2) Tim Berners Lee

c) A web browser 3) Internet

d) A search engine 4) Orkut

e) Social networking site 5) Internet Explorer

10) Name a few uses of internet.

11) How to copy a word document ?

12) How to create an email-id?

13) How to send a mail?

14) What can we do using a search engine?

15) What is a spreadsheet?

Avinash and Ankit teaching the kids operation in Excel

Amartya telling the excited kids about drawing in Ms Paint

 

Click the play button

 

Deepak teaching the kids of something the felt "miraculous", Youcam.