Pavitra Gautam
Stefanie Wuschitz speaks to Pavitra Gautam for the Open Hardware Europe Summit and the Coded Cultures: Openism festival that happened in Vienna on May 19, 2016.
Can you tell us about your own background and how you got to work with Karkhana?
I completed my Electronics and Communication Engineering studies at one of the Engineering Colleges in Nepal. I always had interest in technology and tinkering. I was the kind of students who would stay in clubs more than in the classes. After I completed Engineering I co-founded the robotics association of Nepal. It was an umbrella organizations where different robot makers could come together. I volunteered for two years, but I was bored in the sense that there were no interesting clear developments that I could see in Nepal. I was about to come abroad for studies, but then I met Sakar in one of the google events. We discussed and it was a very good fit for us. My co-founder, Sakar, had come from a global area and I had the local understanding, so we decided to work together. To be honest, we didn’t know what will work, we had some general ideas. It was a very good fit and we realized it was very nice to work together. And that is how we started Karkhana.
Let me give you a small history of Karkhana. Because Karkhana didn’t start out as an education company, we started out as a product design company in Nepal. We were all engineers, we knew how to design things and make systems. One of the first products we designed in Nepal was a vending machine, that could work out of the mobile payment system. It was a collaborative research project. Working on that project we realized that there is no ecosystem for a product design company. Actually is was no ecosystem for ‘making’ in Nepal. There are so many problems: it was really hard to get good tools, it was really hard to get stuff, because everything had to be imported from abroad, there were no mentors available at any university. A lot of challenges, but the biggest challenge was the mind set. For example, if I would have asked one hundred engineers ‘Can you design a vending machine?’. Ninety-nine of them will say: ‘No’, but probably only one will say ‘I will try’. So the number of people who would say ‘I will try’ was very small. So I think the biggest challenge was the attitude and the mind set of people and general engineers. So we had to pivot our plan of a product design company and we started looking else. So when we realized that there is a gap between the people who design and who deliver, or let’s say between the people who imagine and the ones who make them real. For example, an architect and a construction worker. Both are working for the same objective, but the way they are working is totally different. Both of them work in Silos, and this Silo-mentality is the biggest challenge in creating something innovative and new. It stops the interdisciplinary integration. So that’s when we decided that Karkhana would work on education and that we will try to reduce this gap between the designers and the makers. At the beginning we thought that we will train engineers. But soon we realized that it is too late to try and change the attitude of engineers. So more than to teach them something new it was really hard for us to make them un-learn the things they knew. We tried to teach them design thinking processes, prototyping ideas, but they were stuck with their existing mind set and not able to challenge their understanding. So we thought the right way to do this is to work with the younger students.
And finally we settled down in middle school. A good age, where they have skills like reading, writing and mathematics and we give them skills like critical thinking, creativity, collaboration and communication. We also involve them into maker-based education, giving them ideas like design thinking. And finally packaging all of this into the concepts of Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics. That’s how Karkhana exists today.
What is the key insight that you want to give to your students.
We have this one line: The world is malleable. We don’t want them to explain this idea, but we want them to have this insight after working with us some time. I think the only way to design and innovate something new is to understand that the world around you can be re-shaped with right skills. And everything that you see around you can be re-shaped, re-molded. Everything around us is malleable, right? If it’s a maker or engineer or politician or even anyone who is doing anything in this world, if he understands that the world around us is malleable and we can change it with right skills, that’s the biggest insight.
How do you choose your students? Or how do they choose you?
Karkhana has been working in maker-based education since three years. We don’t have the facility and time to select students. At the moment we work with student, parents and teachers who understand our work. These are generally middle school students who have some kind of interest in tinkering and making or technology at large.
Did you choose to become a company?
We are a private company.
Because it seems that you do a lot of non-profit work, right?
True, true! Yes that is a question we get asked a lot. My co-founders and me were always the kind of people who believed in profit-generation and we believed the only way to sustain a good economy is by true entrepreneurship. Also, of course, as you said, we do a lot of non-profit work. We collaborate with public schools, we design curriculums, we research on a lot of education activities, but we think that all these things we do has some value. I think that when we deliver this kind of work to different schools and parents it’s fair to charge them. I think in these terms it helps us to be sustainable. The reason we don’t fully depend on grants, although we do take some few grants at times, is because of our freedom. Because there are different grants that fit to our idea. So let’s say we would get a grant this year for three years, after three years we have evolved so much and our ideas have changed, in this case it makes us very rigid, and we always want to be flexible and self-sustainable. For this reason we have become a private company, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t work as an NGO. We are a social business, in that way we keep doing what we like and at the same time make an impact.
I heard that you had a big campaign right after the terrible earthquakes last year, can you explain that?
As you know Nepal was shook by an earthquake on Saturday. Luckily Saturday is a day were all the schools are closed. But Karkhana was open and we had a few students. Luckily noone was hurt and nothing happened. We secured all the students and parents. For a couple of days it was total chaos, we didn’t know what to do. For example I lost my house myself. I think it’s nothing compared to so many people who have lost lives and everything, but for a few days we were so confused what to do and what not to do. As educators, as entrepreneurs the kind of skills we had were not good enough for rescue efforts. After a few days we realized that as educators we have skills to engage students. Because after the earthquake there were so many shelter camps, all around in open grounds. We started making engagement lesson plans. We started making these activities and go out to different shelter camps and engage students. We thought as educators we can give some positive environment to students. At that point parents were in a total stress, the students were having lots of trauma, so we thought we could help them in that way. Slowly we started going to more and more places. And after a few weeks we had a bunch of lesson plans and realized that it could be used by any teacher all around the country, in all of the affected areas.
So we partnered with one of the other educational organizations and we converted the whole lesson plan into a transitory curriculum, a curriculum that can be worked through in two weeks. The idea was, for example, when the school would open it was not possible to say ‘Ok we start with the first lesson today, open your books and turn to page 2’. It’s not possible in this way, because people are in trauma, parents are not willing to send the students, they have a lot of deep trauma with them. They are really stressed. So teachers had no ideas of how they can engage students. Make them comfortable inside a school environment, because everybody is scared to come together in a school building. And we designed these transitory lesson plans that had a lot of activities, lots of hands-on activities actually, lots of games, lots of explanations and games about earthquakes to understand the earthquake. We designed this complete lesson plan and trained around 100 trainers at the beginning. And after these 100 trainers were trained they were sent out to 9 different districts and they trained another 6685 teachers, in 14 days! It was crazy! It was one of the biggest educational efforts that happened in Nepal after the earthquake. More than anything the satisfaction was so good, even when you were a teacher, even in times of crisis, there are things that you can do. Finally indirectly we reached around 200.000 students. That was really good. You know what was the biggest advantage that we got out of this crisis? We got the opportunity to inject activity based learnings inside the classes. Before the teachers and the students didn’t have the understanding, because they had never seen activity based classes or the tinkering based classes. We took this window of opportunity as a time where we could inject these kinds of lesson plans and lots of activities inside the classroom. So in a way this crisis helped us to amplify our work.
How did you implement open hardware in this effort?
It’s a mixed idea. As educators we use a lot of tools. And when we talk about tools it’s both, hardware and software. For example we have different programs where we teach technology, we have different programs where we teach design thinking processes. For example, we have a course called ‘Creative Computing’, this is a program where we teach our students how to think in a programming language, but not trying to teach them a language, but trying to teach them logics, to do this we use different open hardwares like Arduinos, other open hardwares and other open softwares as well. I think the interesting part about being a maker is that so many times we just create our own open hardware. For example, we have to design a balloon powered car. In those times we just look around, ask people who have created similar ideas, even open hardware means so many things these days. So the designs that made for their project, coupling with their software, we get a lot of inspiration from this work and combine them and create something new. I think the one of the biggest advantages of having this open mind set on open hardware and software is that it propagates creativity. When someone designs something and makes it open, another person can take it and add his understanding and value and create something new. For example, now we work a lot with a lasercutter.
You have a lasercutter there?
Yes, we brought one in a few months back. There are so many designs and open hardware ideas using lasercutters, so we’ve been downloading and working with them. It’s starts as simple as making a box, but there are as complex ideas as making a balloon powered car.
I think for educators and makers open hardware and software helps us a lot, because so many times we can not use it directly, but need to modify them in a way that it is more fitting for students. So open hardware and software helps us a lot. We not only use that we also try to contribute to the community, whenever we design something we try to upload it to our website. We have designed, for example, one year back this Arduino IDE(integrated development environment ) for Raspberry Pi. That actually has a monitor, so we uploaded the whole project on GitHub and made it open.
Everything we try to do we document it and put it together, we have got an active blog of different lesson plans we use as educators, different techniques, and now even work on space programs, how to make DIY Satellite. Everything we are doing we keep on the blog. (http://www.karkhana.asia/)
We are an organization that has been an increasing supporter of the open source community. We always believed that this is the way to go forward in a way that it’s a tool to educate more people.
And we always want to be part of the community which contributes to the community as well. Nepal is not a big country and we only existed for a couple of years, but it’s slowly starting to have a more maker-based community. more people working on open technologies. Slowly I think in Nepal we will have a bigger community.
