Asha Jyothi has initiated an education program called Project Spark. Project Spark intends to raise the bar of achievement for underprivileged students by engaging them in science topics in the early part of their student life. The Project intends to augment the school work by introducing concepts and topics that are not covered by the curriculum. This project is run primarily by Rama Gundapaneni from USA and coordinated by Nani Ch Jagadesh from India

This engagement will provoke the students to ask the right questions and improve their standards in the classroom.

We laid the groundwork for Project Spark in the academic year 2022-2023. We have started our work with 12 students from Generation Yuvaa hostel that provides schooling and shelters for underprivileged kids.

We picked students who are in 6-8 grades and started to prepare them for Project Spark activities. As part of this preparation, they were provided with a couple of laptops and taught them typing with typing.com. All the students have created gmail accounts so that they can submit the assignments given after each science lesson. We have also taught students how to use Khanmigo (GPT-4 architecture AI tool from Khan Academy) and ChatGPT. Following Video shows the result of this engagement for the academic year 2022-2023.

Video thanking Asha Jyothi for sponsorship

We have also prepared presentation slides that teach Big Picture of how stars, planets and life on earth evolved. This is a 16 chapter series that covers the basics for 6-8 grade kids. Following link gives you the access to view the presentation slides

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1QtM2PnS8FkXefTXsoDFiee8-ygvemY8RznZDUYRYFWU/edit?usp=sharing

Project Spark is run through an association of mentors in the USA and India. Mentors in the USA are giving their time with volunteer effort. Mentors in India are associated by taking money for the services they offer. We are raising money to cover the expenses of the Mentors.

For the academic year 2023-2024, we are planning to provide more laptops so that they can work on their assignments in a timely manner.

We are also planning to extend to more schools and have one full time mentor to run the program more extensively in India.