Proposal for Smart Classroom Setup

The funds being requested is for the following project: Setting up 2 smart classrooms at Sense Kaleidoscopes. As part of creating our own curriculum, we have observed that using technology to teach our students has brought surprising results. Children with autism have brains that love consistency and predictability. Therefore, they love working on laptops and tablets and using technology to communicate better. After years of not receiving the right kind of training, most children on the autism spectrum in India, have gaps in cognition and comprehension that can be as long as 8 years by the time they are 12 years old. This gap becomes insurmountable as they enter into their teenage years. The only way to combat it is to provide the right kind of training in the right kind of environment that is geared towards enhancing learning outcomes for children with autism.

We need smart classrooms because we need the best resources to help children who have severe challenges to overcome. Educating children who have sensory difficulties, seizures, high anxiety and learning disabilities requires good teachers and resources that can help us bring out the ability of the children to learn.

This project specifically seeks to address the gaps in learning as well as the defects in the current education system when it comes to teaching autism. We have existing smart classrooms that have been very successful in inculcating a love for learning in our autistic students. It has also given them the confidence to deal with technology. We incorporate a lot of visual aids while creating our lessons. Our children make their own presentations on various subjects and share them with the class. The ease of operating a touch screen and the clarity of the images and videos on those screens make learning a fun and interactive experience. The request to set up more such classrooms is fueled by the increasing number of students who wish to enrol in our academic program at Sense Kaleidoscopes. We wish to help more students increase their cognitive functioning as well as comprehension, which we believe is the key to empowering autism.

The impact of this project would be improved learning outcomes for autistic children in the age group 7 to 13. Our current teacher-student ratio is at 1:4. It is not possible to teach large groups of children on the autism spectrum in one classroom. Every child comes with their own strengths and weaknesses as well as behaviours. This is why we put together a class of students based on whether they can work well together. Running multiple such classrooms gives us valuable data that goes into our research work as well. Research further refines the content that we build into our curriculum. The curriculum then builds courses that we plan to offer to individuals and organizations in an online format. Therefore our work in the smart classroom is fundamental to our vision of helping as many children as we can irrespective of their geographical location.