Pratham Education Foundation

Building with Pratham 

Hi, my name is Phil Yao and I want to thank Pratham for an incredible summer—I’m sure I will have a fruitful relationship with Pratham moving forward. One thing I will never forget is going on a field visit along with Shabdagandha Kulkarni and Tanvi Deshpande to a Pratham school here in Mumbai and interviewing the children there. It seemed to me that they really cared about their education in a way that is now becoming quite rare at least in the United States. The children I encountered didn’t take their education for granted, and that was something really refreshing to see.

I had an idea before I came to Mumbai that I would help create a virtual library that would incorporate free, high-quality educational materials from online sources into a single electronic library. These materials would under Creative Commons licenses, thus allowing their redistribution. When I got here, I further realized the sheer number of educational resources Pratham itself had which could be incorporated into the library. Each day I worked to build the library, which now includes English resources, math resources, science resources (physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, and more), history resources, computing resources, and more. I did so much downloading and waiting that I probably strained the internet in the office. The hope in creating the library was that down the line, a teacher in Pratham could, say, pull up an appropriate educational resource that he/she needed, and share it with the class.

This could be a cool video on the letters of the alphabet, or even one of over 1500 Pratham Books publications. A classroom could never hold 1500 publications in physical form, but in an electronic, searchable form, this becomes easy and manageable. Currently, only 200 Pratham Books publications are in the library, but this will grow over the upcoming year as edits are made to the upcoming editions.

The uses of the virtual library are potentially many, and a number of higher level resources not intended for younger children are also included. Higher level resources could either be used by older students or adults learning in a Pratham computer center, or even by teachers of younger students who wish to build a stronger foundation of science training before teaching their students. I’ve been briefly working also with the Vodafone project, which looks to streamline digital learning content into the classroom using a device called the WebBox, since our projects have a lot of interesting intersection.

I’ve had a wonderful time at Pratham, and I’ve enjoyed meeting all the different people in the Mumbai office as well in the Delhi offices. I want to thank Shilpa for being highly supportive of my project and helping me through any difficulties I encountered, and Mala for giving excellence advice and guidance for my project. I also want to thank Madhav for his warm interest and effective help in my project, as well as Farida and Rukmini for chatting with me and giving me a lot of great advice. I want to thank Anamara for giving me a brief analysis project, which give me insight into the math and language progress made by different states (as well as the benchmarks used). I want to thank Tanvi for being a great, supportive friend in the office. I lastly want to thank Shabdagandha for being so warm and helpful, and she always seemed to know the right person whenever I needed.

I will of course continue my work with Pratham as I head back to college, keeping in touch to make sure the virtual library project stays healthy and really blossoms. There is still much to be done, and my hope is that I have left a small contribution here at Pratham which will come to help many teachers and students in the years to come.

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Phil Yao is an intern with Pratham from Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He worked previously teaching literature and writing in a nonprofit called Prep for Prep (of which he is an alumnus), as well as planning a new technology high school and formulating computer science curricula for the NYC public school system during his time in Mayor Bloomberg’s office at City Hall. Phil became fascinated with Pratham’s extensive work across over 20 states of India.