BHOPAL (Madhya Pradesh)
Ioli Shrivastava, a class 12 student in US had visited Bhopal years ago, getting a feel of problems of the deprived kids who found it hard to learn computer programming due to financial problems and poor English.
The benevolent girl did not forget the issue when she returned to US with family.
Years after, she is back to the city with a customised computer programming course in Hindi and is also teaching them personally at a private school these days.
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Ioli, a class 12 student at a school in Washington State (USA), has translated a basic course in computer programming of the Harvard University into Hindi and prepared video lessons based on it for the underprivileged children studying in a school in Bhopal.
Ioli’s parents live in the US and she was born and brought up there.
Her father, Sulabh Shrivastava, hails to Bhopal and works for Microsoft in the USA. Her mother is a housewife. Ioli’s paternal grandparents live at Danish Nagar in the city. Her grandfather PK Shrivastava retired as joint director (public prosecution).
Ioli learnt students' issues years ago
The 17-year-old Ioli, who is visiting India along with her parents, told the Free Press, she studies at Skyline High School in Sammamish city in Washington state. During her visit to Bhopal some years back, she interacted with school students and realised that many of them could not access computer programming courses because of lack of monetary resources and also poor command of English.
She put in efforts to customise a course in US
Back in the US, when she took Harvard University’s CS50 course, an entry-level course in computer programming, she remembered these students and decided to do something for them. She approached the Harvard University’s professor who was providing the course, to obtain permission to translate it into Hindi and customise the content to better suit the needs of these students.
After getting permission, she did the translation and customisation herself. “Though Hindi is not a part of my school curriculum, I have learnt the language at Gurukul - a school in the Washington area run by a non-profit to teach Indian languages,” she said.
Then came the next challenge – to provide access to these courses to the students. She worked with a school in Bhopal – Sankalp Public School – to teach this course to the students. She delivered the courses via recorded video classes. With the help of local organisations, she provided Wi-Fi hotspots to these students and built a website to host the translated and customised course.
During her stay in Bhopal, she had in-person interactions with the children. “In future, I plan to hold live sessions with the students,” she said.
