The Big Picture

AID is currently involved in a mass literacy and science education program in India mainly targeting schools in rural areas and urban slums. We are working on a model program in over 15,000 schools in the state of Tamil Nadu with the full cooperation of State and District administrations. In every school, AID plans to distribute low-cost science experiment kits, pamphlets, slideshows and movies on primary and high school science and math topics. Currently, science and math are seen as the toughest subjects in school and cause many children to drop out of school. Through supplementary materials, we hope to make these areas easier for the students to learn and stay in school.

Gyaan Daan & You

To successfully conduct this program, we need lots of materials in the form of presentations, booklets and movie clips. AID Milwaukee invites you to come together for a day and help us create them. Through this you will be directly helping the children. This effort does not require any monetary donations from you. (Of course, you are more than welcome to contribute monetarily to this effort!). We can use what we already know on basic topics such as light, heat, environment and chemistry along with other references such as the Internet to develop these materials. Anything we produce here will be sent to India with minimal modification and distributed across the model program area.

At the Event

At the event, you can team up with others that want to work on the same topic (2-4 people per team). You can bring some of your friends and thus come in as a team or work alone. You will be able to pick a topic either from a pre-existing list or come up with one of your own (relevant to the subjects, of course). You can pre-register with us and select a topic beforehand. This way, you can be sure you are not working on something somebody else is already working on. You will however need at least one laptop per team, so please bring one if you have it. From past experience, we expect the complete production to take about six hours, part of which goes to familiarize yourself with the topic. You could do this in one sitting at the event or do part of it at the event and complete it later at your convenience. After that, you can email us the completed version. In any case, plan to attend at least two hours to get an idea of how to develop the document. Pre-registering would help you to do familiarize yourself with the topic before the event, enabling you to spend your time at the event effectively on creating the document. To help you work on the topic, you can refer to sources such as the wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org). The venue is wireless internet ready. So, make sure you laptop is wireless capable. We have a group of volunteers that have gone through this effort available to assist you at the event.