The Hindu                 30.04.2013

School students have solutions to civic, social problems

Whenever a medical study comes out correlating the
intake of alcohol and tobacco to health to diseases such as cancer, the
medical terms and jargon are simply too much for many people to
comprehend and as such, they just remain unconvinced.

Now,
they have a convincing reason for, a group of Corporation school
students have conducted a study in Coimbatore among those consuming
liquor and tobacco and found that 35 per cent of them had cancer, and
were still continuing to indulge in their vices.

Various other health aliments also surfaced in the survey done by four students of Corporation Girls High School, Sidhapudhur.

In
a simple but effective manner, they worked out a neat presentation with
bar charts highlighting the proportion of various health hazards among
those taking alcohol and tobacco.

This was but one of
the scores of projects under way as part of a summer camp programme
being conducted at 23 Corporation schools by American India Foundation, a
non-governmental organisation working in the education sector across
India.

Being conducted between April 22 and May 24,
more than 1,000 students in Classes VI to IX will receive training to
develop skills to tackle social and civic issues that plague their
locality, says V. Alexander, zonal coordinator (DE programme) of
foundation,

The training has been split into three
categories: Digital Story Telling (DST), Project-Based Learning (PBL)
methodology, and subject content.

In DST for which
five Corporation schools have been selected, he says the students will
be trained in recording an issue through video or still camera, compile
the content and prepare a documentary using software such as Windows
Movie Maker and Photo Story.

In PBL, the students
take the concept from the curriculum and compare it to a real life
situation by making field survey, analysing the findings and suggesting a
solution.

“We just provide the initial training in
using these softwares. The entire documentary is shot and compiled only
by the students. Several DST and PBL projects have already been
completed to topics ranging from water conservation, plastic use to
alcohol and tobacco addiction,” he says.

This project
was part of ‘Digital Equaliser’ (DE) Programme — for which the civic
body had inked a three-year MoU (2012-15) with the Foundation — under
which subject content was provided in Tamil through technology. It
covers all the 10 high schools, 16 higher secondary schools, and one
special school of Coimbatore Corporation, which had provided 464
computers for the project.