STEAM Fest 2023 @ Deepanam

This was the 2nd year of the STEAM Fest at Deepanam School, and the first one that I was to attend. I expected it to be another Science, Technology, Engineering and Math lab with fun experiments for and by the students. What I saw was a successful endeavour to make anyone of any age fall in love with learning or at the very least, just jump into the fun and play.

The conventional STEM exhibit where students stand around and explain their respective projects was transformed into a scavenger hunt spread over 10 stations, with each station encapsulating one of the projects Deepanam students had worked on this past year. All of us who went to the fest, including Deepanam’s own students, siblings, parents, and the wider Auroville community, learned about the STEAM projects by participating in games, activities and challenges that were uniquely designed to highlight each project’s underlying theme and concepts.

For those like me, who wonder what is the ‘A’ in ‘STEAM’, it is Art. So in the project, ‘Fantasy Creatures Unleashed’ the youngest students of Deepanam conceived, conceptualized, and created their own fantasy animal. While I enjoyed the artistic expression of the animals, I also found a lot of zoology being covered. The kids had to think of movement, reproduction, protection and respiration features that they would like to give to their animal. At another station, the children had made their own amazing musical instruments from simple, readily available materials. But this was also a physics project, examining how different objects, when aligned in a certain way, create sounds – strings, wind, or percussion.

What I also appreciate about the STEAM Lab at Deepanam is the collaboration between units. The lab is the brainchild of Anupama Balaji of Yuvabe, an Auroville tech and design company, focussed on youth empowerment. And the lab is supported by Yuvabe’s young team, all of whom spend their mornings volunteering with different schools and units as part of their daily work service at Yuvabe.

I had the opportunity to connect with Mahavir, the executive at Deepanam, where he explained his belief that education is not about teaching students what to learn, but about creating an environment that fosters the love of learning in the students; where they learn to teach themselves beyond their school years. This reminded me of the quote by Sri Aurobindo – “The first principle of true teaching is that nothing can be taught”.

It made me wonder what it would have been like to go to a school where learning was fun and play, where there were no subjects in the ‘dislike’ column, or perhaps no ‘subjects’ at all. What would it have been like if my education had been more about exploring concepts, experimenting, making me forever more curious? What if I had had a school like this?