Impact and Case studies

Asha for Education — Educator Workshops

Partner since 2021 · ~150 educators/year

Asha for Education approached us to help their educators engage with science beyond the prescribed curriculum, and to expose them to different ways of teaching it. In response, we've built five distinct themed workshops for their team, each exploring a different lens on science. The most recent, delivered in May 2026 and titled "Once Upon a Time in Science," used childhood classic stories as a gateway into scientific concepts.

2019 · 45 students

The Foundation asked us to introduce a concept each from Physics and Biology to middle-school children residing in a shelter home. We designed roughly 8 original experiments each on Light and Respiration, delivered through teamwork. It remains one of the most engaging workshops we've run — children began connecting the concepts directly to their own surroundings, exactly the kind of cross-linking the pedagogy is built to produce.

2026 · 15 students

TNSTC asked us to introduce a Biology concept to middle-school children from an urban metropolis. We designed a focused 3-hour workshop on the classification of the living world, covering plant and animal sub-classification, with flashcards built in as a hands-on learning and retention tool.

3-year program · ~60 classes/year · ~1 hour/class · 5 topics · Starting grade 7

Our academic programs are customized to student needs — sometimes simply replacing chalk-and-board teaching with hands-on experimentation, sometimes a specially designed program for exploring science beyond the classroom. This program, shaped by a pre-assessment of the children's needs, follows a three-stage progression:

● Beginner — bridges age- and grade-specific fundamental gaps through activity-based learning. No formal experimentation yet; children practice observing, classifying, predicting, and inferring.

● Intermediate — moves from basic science understanding into CASE pedagogy, introducing hands-on experimentation built on CASE's five core pillars, applied across five chosen topics.

● Final — continues CASE-based hands-on learning, either deepening the beginner-stage topics or moving to entirely new ones, based on the children's evolving needs.

Outcomes:

● A higher proportion of children from the program choose science after Class 12, compared to the overall class average

● Teachers actively encourage students to enroll in these classes

● Students have gone on to participate in national science fairs, including Wipro Earthian

● Of two students shortlisted for the NYAS Fellowship — a prestigious fellowship for high schoolers — one was selected

● These classes run before school hours or on holidays and are entirely voluntary; attendance has held at 100%

Since 2021 · ~50 children benefited to date

This program, supported by KSI Trust, brings the same experiential science approach to a government school in Thiruvarur district. Close to 50 children have gone through the program so far.

Outcome:

● One student from the program was selected to study at a Model School in the district — schools set up by the Tamil Nadu government to provide more intensive coaching for meritorious children.

At both Lady Sivaswami Ayyar Girls' Higher Secondary School and the Government Higher Secondary School, Radhanarasimmapuram, KriVid(YA) has helped establish a 100-book library at each site, built entirely through used books gifted by donors. The collections include titles from well-known children's authors such as Julia Donaldson, giving students access to quality reading material alongside their science learning.

Annual since 2021 · Project sites in Thiruvannamalai, Kayathar (Thoothukudi district), Thiruvallur, and Kottur (Thiruvarur district) · 20–85 teachers per site

This program trains teachers in a multidisciplinary approach to science through fundamental and derived quantities — how to use measurement tools, determine the sensitivity and accuracy of measuring devices, and investigate scientific concepts (such as temperature, heat, and thermal energy) through direct measurement.

One-time engagement

Established in 1922 in Triplicane, Chennai, the Lady Willingdon Institute of Advanced Study in Education is one of Tamil Nadu's oldest government teacher-training institutions, and was the first government institution in the state to receive a NAAC five-star accreditation. Trainee-educators were each assigned a topic across Biology, Physics, and Chemistry, along with a set of 8 experiment cards spanning the relevant concepts. They then delivered a demo lesson combining their own teaching skills with KriVid(YA)'s experimental pedagogy.

Outcomes:

● Teachers consistently tell us they value learning to teach by doing

● Asha runs Rural Technology Centres where children explore digital technology (office applications, Scratch, HTML, physical computing, digital media). In one instance, a teacher trained through this program taught the science concept of Heat, and children built a Scratch program based on it — the project was shortlisted among Asha's competing student projects presented at Amazon and IIT Madras

2021We delivered a session on microbes for APF educators, giving them a first-hand experience of hands-on learning pedagogy — and the depth of learning it creates compared to learning through reading alone. 

We developed science content for Asha Kanini, aligned with the Tamil Nadu education board syllabus, covering grades 3–5 and 6–9 across 7 topics each. Each lesson plan includes a pre-requisite activity sheet, curated resources for further learning, classroom activities to build conceptual understanding, and a post-assessment. This content is accessible  at Asha Kanini's science package 

Outcome:

● Children and educators across Tamil Nadu continue to access this content to understand and practice these concepts