Pi Jam Foundation

Vision:

The vision of Pi Jam Foundation is to create a future where every student has access to affordable technology and the opportunity to develop essential problem-solving, computational thinking, and creative thinking skills through Computer Science education. We believe in a world where education is equitable, inspiring young minds to embrace technology and empowering them to shape their own future. We are committed to nurturing the creators and problem solvers of tomorrow. 

Our mission is to democratize computer science education at scale. We are committed to breaking down barriers and ensuring that every student, regardless of their background or resources, has access to quality computer science education. We aim to empower students with 21st-century skills that will ensure that they thrive in the digital era.

By demystifying technology and making it inclusive, we aspire to inspire young learners from diverse communities to engage with computer science and explore its endless possibilities.

Through innovative and comprehensive computer science education we foster a sense of empowerment and agency in their educational journey. We believe that every student has the potential to become a creator, an innovator, and a problem solver. Through our programs, we aim to unlock this very potential. 

Elavarasi Manogaran is a post-graduate from National University of Singapore and University of Edinburgh, UK. She is an educational technology researcher and an advocate of equitable computing education with her work being recognized by international bodies like ISTE, CSTA and CTE-STEM. As a curriculum Lead at Pi Jam foundation (in collaboration with UNICEF, India), Elavarasi and her team has developed an inclusive, culturally responsive K-12 computing curriculum, which has been recognized as a best practice in digital transformation at the G20 education Summit 2023, India and UN Transforming Education Summit 2022, reaching several thousands of under-represented students in India. Elavarasi has led and submitted several ed-tech & computing education research grant proposals and guided with strategic planning and timelines for technology-initiated projects. She is currently interested in enhancing CS education for younger learners, exploring strategies that integrate socio-emotional learning into CS to make technology learning more inclusive and meet the needs of all students. Her vision is to empower all learners to think computationally and solve problems with technology irrespective of their gender, strengths or weaknesses and encourage every coder to also be a good human.

Our team leader has a deep understanding of education and technology, and our team is diverse and committed to promoting equity and inclusion. Our curriculum and technology developers have extensive experience in computer science research as well. Therefore, they have a deep understanding of the subject matter and have designed a curriculum that is relevant and effective in teaching students about design thinking and problem-solving through technology.

Our team also comprises of educators who are members of underrepresented communities. We believe that this diversity is essential to designing solutions that are truly responsive to the needs of the communities we serve. This contributes to a sense of ownership and investment in the project and also ensures that the solution is designed with those we serve in mind. The fact that student interns make up an instrumental part of the Pi Jam team is a testament to our commitment to engaging with the communities we are serving. These interns are students who have gone through the Pi Jam classroom program themselves, and their feedback and ideas ensure that the solution is responsive to the needs of the communities we serve. This also portrays the cyclic nature of our interventions where the students feel a sense of ownership towards the cause. While these students are enrolled in full-time courses in various computer education programs, they continue to find time to give back to the community. This space of co-creation and collaboration created by the work culture within the organization encourages the team members take ownership to contribute to the cause. The passionate and cause-driven team at Pi Jam would ensure that the fellows have a meaningful collaboration at the organization. Our team's experience, dedication, and qualifications ensure that we create a space for impactful and evidence-based partnerships to deliver an effective technology-enabled solution and help learners practice collaborative problem-solving.

Pi Labs are technology enabled spaces allowing children to build 21st century skills like computational thinking, problem solving and creativity.

The Indian education system is currently grappling with a significant crisis. According to the Annual Survey of Education Report 2022, only ¼ of all students in Grade III were able to do grade-level arithmetic and only 20% were able to comprehend grade-level text. This alarming statistic highlights a fundamental gap in foundational skills among learners.

Furthermore, the education system fails to cater to the diverse needs of all children, relying instead on a one-size-fits-all instructional approach. This approach overlooks the importance of creating systemically designed spaces where all students can foster creativity, innovation, and exploration. Without such spaces, students are deprived of opportunities to express themselves, build confidence, and develop a sense of identity.

Traditionally, the focus of the Indian education system has been on developing basic skills like language and mathematics at the foundational level. While these skills are undoubtedly crucial, the overemphasis on them as the sole outcomes of learning has resulted in a pervasive culture of rote learning in schools. As a consequence, students often appear disconnected from real-life applications of knowledge, lacking judgment, self-awareness, management skills, and the ability to effectively tackle the demands and problems of everyday life.

Moreover, learning in such a context limits students’ imagination and inspiration, making education non-participatory with students consuming rather than creating. 

This excessive reliance on rote learning has further marginalized critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity within the education system. Students are frequently burdened with the pressure to perform exceptionally well academically, leading to an exclusionary learning environment that fails to accommodate the diverse needs of all students.

Our goal is to build an affordable and equitable technology-enabled learning space to foster 21st-century skills like computational thinking, critical thinking, problem-solving and creativity for all kinds of learners

We aim to address the needs of the students we work with by creating a comprehensive learning experience that is accessible, culturally relevant, and effective. Our solution, Pi Labs,  is designed to break down barriers to technology access and create a level playing field where all students, regardless of their socio-economic backgrounds and geographical location, can access high-quality computer science education. We make use of affordable computing tools like Raspberry Pis to make computer science education (both creative and physical computing) accessible to students from diverse backgrounds. Our cost-effective approach also involves training and building the capacity of in-house teachers, providing them with the skills and tools they need to teach computer science effectively.

However, we realize that making just the tools and resources affordable and accessible doesn’t make learning truly equitable. Equity in computing education means every student is instilled with the salient qualities of confidence, self-efficacy, perseverance, and compassion as they construct new knowledge using technology. Our solution infuses socio-emotional learning with technology education to develop good socio-emotional potential in our younger learners. We make sure every student is allowed to use technology to freely express who they are and their identities and passion. We encourage our students to look at technology as a thinking tool that every student can use irrespective of the cognitive challenges. We believe in giving choices to our students in how they wish to be engaged in their learning, the choice of roles they would like to take up, and the choice of tools to express themselves and solve problems collaboratively by leveraging each other’s strengths and weaknesses.  

Our students learn and create projects relevant to their local context which allows for a low-floor and high-ceiling approach to learning. They are able to experiment, create, and tinker with technology through a culturally-responsive lens that encourages a deeper connection with the projects. Our approach can be easily adapted to and contextualized to fit the specific needs of a global community of stakeholders and scaffolds in rigor to allow students to learn at their own pace.

The monitoring and evaluation framework that we employ allows us to measure students’ computational thinking skills, creativity, and problem-solving skills and we also hope to measure in the near future how our computing education directly impacts basic skills like literacy, numeracy, science, etc, in addition to supporting their socio-emotional quotient and holistic development.

As part of Pi Labs, students also have the opportunity to supplement their classroom learning with a mobile-based tool that allows for learning to continue for students from the comfort of their homes. Through interactive problem-solving courses with descriptive videos, and a personalized open learning space where students code for self-expression and problem-solving, students build essential life skills while learning core computer science concepts.

Our solution Pi Labs was featured as one of the hundred most impactful and scalable solutions in the Global Innovative Collection by HundrED Finland. Our solution was also awarded the Nasscom Award for Best Innovation in Education.

As we develop our solution, we engage with students and teachers in a variety of ways. We have conducted extensive research to better understand the needs and challenges of the communities we are serving. This has included conducting focus groups, interviews, and surveys to gather feedback and insights from a diverse range of stakeholders. We are also working closely with decision-makers and system partners to build inclusive and effective programs at scale. 

We also engage with the target population in a variety of ways and incorporate their input into our design process. We have predominantly taken up formative research along with a few summative studies. 
For the National Conference on Computational Thinking in Schools, our team presented papers on the diverse theme. One paper explored "Computational Thinking evolves intrinsically through Experiential Learning in a CS class: Teachers confront a lack of confidence and Stereotypes, besides learning CT skills". Another paper studied the "Impact of CT on Student Learning after the Inclusion of Parents". Furthermore, in our research paper "Building/Incorporating 21st Century Skills through Activity-Based CT Pedagogy", we reinforced the need to use project-based learning as a way to ensure 100% participation in the classroom. 

We also researched how Social Emotional Learning can be made part of Computer Science class. In our paper "Socio-Emotional Learning and Civic Education within Computer Science: Examples from the Let’s Code CS Curriculum" we explore this theme in detail. 

Through our research, we have also highlighted how culturally relevant content can be integrated into Computer Science education allowing for contextualization and a deeper connection with learning. 

Assessments are also a significant process for us to measure our student learning along with the case studies, and interviews we conduct. 

We are committed to evaluating the impact of our solution on an ongoing basis to ensure that we are delivering the maximum possible impact. Some of the research studies have been an effort in this very direction. As part of the impact evaluation for our programs, we conducted various assessments to determine the same. A study conducted across 4 states involving 2,00,000 + students and 3500 Teachers depicted an improvement of 21% in Algorithmic Thinking Skills and a 14% improvement in Problem-Solving Ability. It also revealed that 89% of girl children were open to pursuing a career in science and technology compared to 36% at the beginning. 90% of kids were curious about learning more about programming and technology and 100% of students created a digital artifact/project.

Another research study which was presented at the National Computational Thinking Conference in 2022, evaluated the lack of awareness about Computational Thinking, the stereotypical views, and the prevalent fear around learning computer science. Computational thinking, while being a foundational skill, often creates apprehension due to the various complex terminologies it is accompanied with, such as abstraction, decomposition, etc. However, we found out that CT skills similar to mathematical or scientific thinking can also evolve intrinsically as learners see the beauty and wonder of computer science (CS) and reflect on their experiences in their CS classes without having to assimilate complex CT-specific terms. Analysis of responses from our foundational teacher training session showed that despite demonstrating a lack of confidence and stereotypical views about CS,  70% of beginner teachers exhibited one or more CT skills or attitudes as they reflected on their experiences, and experimented in a foundational CS class. Our solution embraces this experiential learning approach and encourages collaborative problem-solving through both physical and creative computing education. Owing to the lack of confidence among our foundational learners and in an effort to break the bias and stereotypes that exist in CS education, we have included socio-emotional learning (SEL) as one of the key dimensions in our computational thinking evaluation framework. SEL has been a significant part of our pedagogy and directly confronts the preconceived notion that CS cannot affect the moral understanding of students. Our work on integrating SEL with CS will be hosted at the International Conference on Technology for Education (ISTE 2023) in June in Philadelphia.  

In addition to this, our mobile-based application Code Mitra, which we use to supplement 21st-century learning is recognized as one of the 15 scalable solutions in India by a study conducted by UNICEF, Yuwaah,  and NCERT (National Council of Education Research and Training), India, allowing students to build the essential life skills at a foundational level.

Over the past few years, Pi Jam has collaborated with multiple system partners and government departments to take CS education to underserved communities to ensure that no student is left behind. We believe in an equitable and inclusive classroom experience for every student and design our learning models to support universal design for learning. We believe that by collaborating with MIT’s Leap Project, we will be able to validate the impact of Pi Labs and our assessment frameworks in enhancing the 21st-century skills of our students. This will help us in bolstering our policy efforts to ensure further adoption of our framework at a systemic level.

We wish to monitor and evaluate our students’ thinking skills, creativity, and problem-solving skills to be able to measure the impact of our solution and further grow its evidence base. Although we have come up with our own evidence-driven frameworks and assessments and are in the initial phases of data collection, we need assistance from the LEAP team with implementing our immediate needs as follows,

1. Identifying and providing a plan and structure for data collection, analysis, and reporting of students’ computational thinking aptitude using our CAPS computational thinking framework.

2. Prioritize data collection, analyze, and gain more insights into our problem-solving and creativity assessment.

3. Scaling up our solution, including pitching our frameworks and assessments to expand the program’s reach and impact.  

We believe that the outcomes of this project add to the vision of PiLabs to make 21st-century skills part of every foundational classroom.

We wish to receive support from the LEAP team in using our framework to validate and assess learning outcomes

1. How can classrooms use our computational thinking CAPS framework and its key dimensions to assess children’s computational thinking development? How do we evolve with our approach to data collection, analysis, and reporting?

2. How can teachers make strategic use of our problem-solving and creativity micro-assessment to evaluate children’s learning outcomes and inform instruction?

3. How can we scale our solution to accommodate more foundational learners and pitch our frameworks and assessments to expand the programs’ global reach and impact?  

1. Validation of Frameworks & Assessments:  We require support from the LEAP team to validate the effectiveness of PiLabs frameworks and assessments in promoting 21st-century skills, including computational thinking, creative thinking, design thinking, collaborative problem-solving, and socio-emotional learning. We seek support in planning and structuring data collection, analysis, and reporting of students’ computational thinking aptitude using our CAPS computational thinking framework. We would also like to prioritize data collection and analysis and gain more insights into our problem-solving and creativity micro-assessment. By doing so, we seek to gather robust evidence quantifying the impact of the curriculum on student learning outcomes.

2. Enhancing learning effectiveness: Quantifiable data will be used to identify areas of improvement and make adjustments to the curriculum, ensuring it continues to provide the requisite thinking skills and problem-solving skills, and culturally responsive learning experiences, with a specific focus on broadening participation among young girls and underrepresented students in the field of computer science.

3. Scaling up the solution: Pi Labs employs a scalable approach that can be easily adapted, contextualized, and set up anywhere in the world. We seek help to showcase the adaptability and replicability of our solution. The evidence collected through the collaboration will serve as a foundation for further expanding our framework and practices on a larger scale.

The outcomes of this project will propel us forward, aligning with the future vision of Pi Jam. With the broader vision of introducing 21st-century skills into the very fabric of every classroom, we aim to develop contextualized models to bridge the digital divide and empower the next generation of innovative thinkers and problem solvers who will shape a brighter tomorrow. By leveraging the outputs from the collaboration with MIT's Leap Project, Pi Jam can strive to continually improve its approach and make a meaningful and lasting impact on students' educational journeys. Some of the ways in which we aim to utilize the recommendations are:

Refining and Enhancing Curriculum & Instruction: Based on the inputs from the data analysis and evaluation, we will make informed decisions on making targeted improvements to its curriculum, ensuring a more comprehensive and impactful 21st-century learning experience for students. 

Scaling Programs & Frameworks: The evidence base generated from the collaboration can serve as a foundation for scaling Pi Jam's programs and our assessment frameworks. It can be used to demonstrate the adaptability and replicability of the organization's solution, making a strong case for expanding its reach to more communities and schools. The outputs can be leveraged to facilitate partnerships, enabling Pi Jam to scale its programs and make a broader positive impact.

Reaching more foundational learners: Although our solution caters to primary school students, we wish to expand our learning base to more younger learners. The evidence generated can guide the direction of the project in reaching more younger children in the age group of 2 to 8. The outputs can help shape the design and content of our program, ensuring that it aligns with the goals of Pi Jam and maximizes its impact.

Strengthening Remote Learning: We look forward to using the insights into improving the effectiveness of Pi Jam's mobile-based learning platform, 'Code Mitra,' and its supplementary role in enhancing learning outcomes outside physical Pi Labs. Understanding how the application supports remote learning can help Pi Jam enhance its curriculum and ensure a robust learning experience for students engaging with Pi Jam's programs remotely.

Long-Term Goals:

Integration of 21st Century Skills: The long-term vision of Pi Jam is to make 21st century skills an integral and fundamental part of every classroom. By advocating for the inclusion of these skills in educational institutions nationwide and globally, we aim to empower students with the skills and mindset necessary to thrive in the 21st century.

Systemic Adoption of Pi Labs Framework: Pi Jam aims to achieve systemic adoption of the Pi Labs framework, ensuring that no student, regardless of their background, is left behind in accessing quality CS education. By collaborating with system partners and government departments, we strive to establish Pi Labs as a recognized and effective approach to enhancing learning outcomes in marginalized communities.

Expansion of Programs and Positive Impact: With the support of partners at scale, Pi Jam seeks to expand its programs and frameworks, reaching more students and making a broader positive impact on their lives. We also aim to destigmatize CS education and democratize it at scale. By leveraging technology and resources, we aim to scale our initiatives to maximize their reach and effectiveness, ultimately transforming the educational landscape.

Short-Term Goals:

Validating assessment for Pi Labs: Through the collaboration with MIT's Leap Project, we aim to validate the impact of the Pi Lab framework and assessments in enhancing 21st-century skills and gather robust evidence that supports our approach. This evidence base will strengthen our programs and serve as a foundation for further expansion.

Guiding pilot project for younger students: Pi Jam intends to implement a pilot project aimed at engaging much younger students. The outputs can help shape the design and content of our program, ensuring that it aligns with the goals of Pi Jam and maximizes its impact.

Capacity-Building and Collaborative Learning: Through the interactions between fellows and the on-ground team members, Pi Jam aims to foster collaborative learning outcomes and capacity-building for all stakeholders involved. This will provide a nurturing environment of continuous learning and growth, enhancing the effectiveness of our programs and the overall impact of Pi Jam.

Robust Models and Policy Efforts: Pi Jam is already advising various government institutions on the adoption of this model to create robust frameworks based on the evaluation of its impact and interventions. These models are crucial in increasing the scope of Pi Jam's efforts and advocating for policy changes to support the integration of an accessible and equitable computing curriculum at a systemic level. This goal is aligned with our commitment to effect lasting change on the educational landscape at scale.

By actively pursuing these short and long-term goals, Pi Jam aspires to create a future where quality computer science education is accessible to all students, regardless of their socioeconomic background, and where students are equipped with the skills necessary to thrive in an ever-evolving world.