Spartis

The specific problem that we are solving is the lack of access to extracurricular education, which is a pressing issue affecting communities - locally, nationally and globally. In countries like India, approximately 50% of children do not have access to quality education beyond primary school, exacerbating the problem. Moreover, an even larger number of children lack the opportunity to explore extracurricular activities, which are crucial for holistic development. This disparity in access to extracurriculars perpetuates socio-economic inequalities and hampers the overall development potential of individuals and communities. 

Our solution is to provide resources as well as using our experiences as high schools to teach extracurricular activities to underprivileged children locally - in our city Bengaluru. We are currently working with children on three main extracurriculars - music, sports and visual arts. One of the major factors of the problem itself, is that the children don’t have access to the resources to learn these extracurriculars, so, we as a team are fundraising through bake sales, as well as conducting collection drives of instruments for music and drawing books for visual arts to get these resources. For example, the money from our bake sale went towards buying cones to teach sports. This factor of the problem is solved through our solution. Another factor of the problem itself that is linked with our solution is the teaching part. Although we are still in high school, we believe that we do have the relevant qualifications for this solution. For example, in sports, one of the teachers plays for the state team, whereas in music, many of us play more than one instrument and are well-versed with music theory as well. 

Therefore, our solution solves two of the main factors contributing to the problem itself of not having access to extracurriculars - resources and teachers. 

Our solution is teaching sports, music, visual arts and English to underprivileged children. 

1. Sports - When it comes to teaching and incorporating sports, we first focus on establishing an interest in the activities that we aim to conduct. For example, in the school, the children were incredibly restless yet excited, and would want to play different games on different days, such as Kabaddi, Kho-Kho and more. While we indulged in these games, we decided we could use this as an opportunity to incorporate different skills from the sports we wanted to teach, and then introduce the sport itself. In the case of football, we incorporated passing and dribbling as a new variation to the children’s game Dog and the Bone, which actually did develop their passing and dribbling skills, and allowed us to move onto teaching the sport on its own as the children became familiar with it. Our second step is to focus on teaching larger skills and ideas that come across and under sports. We focus on teamwork, collaboration, rules, scoring and more. This gives the students direction, as it guides them towards understanding and being able to play the sport better, while enjoying and learning. Our classes also involve a revision and rapid-fire wherein we quiz the students and make them demonstrate their learnings from former classes, as we realised students had the tendency to forget the core tenets of certain skills, albeit doing their version of the skill well(eg. dribbling). 
2. Visual Art - In our art, our approach involves immersing children in various artistic disciplines while respecting the mediums and techniques they explore. We've developed our lesson plans logically, first establishing foundational understanding and then applying it to different contexts. For instance, our initial classes focus on lines and types, which gradually evolve into shapes, and later incorporate depth. By allowing students to master each skill before progressing, we ensure that learning is tailored to their needs. To achieve this, we divide students into smaller groups, providing personalized attention.  We have primarily worked with color pencils and watercolors, both of which are easy to handle and minimize mess. As students improve their tool handling, we can introduce more challenging mediums. This structured approach not only fosters creativity but also builds confidence and competence in artistic expression.
3. Music - In music, we started with teaching nursery rhymes to teach them relevant basic English vocabulary which they grasped easily, such as teaching them songs like 'Head, Shoulders, Knees & Toes'. Then, we moved towards teaching music theory, but we realized they got a bit bored of it because it was a lot of information which didn't have any direct application as of then. Then, after incorporating instrumental aspects, such as transferring their theory knowledge on the piano, they found it interesting and grasped it easily. Currently, we are focusing on teaching them songs with social meaning such as ‘heal the world’ on vocals and piano to have a deeper impact. 
4. Technology - audio-visual technology for music.

Our direct service is actively working to support the children at a government school. Upon meeting the school's founder, we gained insight into the current situation of the children. They attend regular classes from Monday to Friday, where the school primarily focuses on reading comprehension and English speaking. Unfortunately, this leaves little room for the development of other crucial skills. This is where our service steps in, aiming to nurture their skills in extracurricular activities such as art, music, and sports. Through these disciplines, they can acquire lifelong skills that they may not have the opportunity to explore otherwise. Art stimulates creative processes, encouraging them to see things from new perspectives, music fosters coordination and rhythm, while sports promote quick thinking and teamwork.

After getting to know the children, we discovered their enthusiasm for learning English. Since then, we have integrated English into our lesson plans, gradually expanding their vocabulary. For instance, during art sessions, we not only draw but also name the objects, thus enhancing their vocabulary. Additionally, we conduct separate English classes monthly, consisting of read-aloud sessions.

In conducting our classes, we prioritise ensuring that everyone works according to their learning style, often adjusting the pace accordingly. One approach that has proven effective across all disciplines is dividing the children into smaller groups. This allows volunteers to focus on each group individually, implementing more efficient teaching methods. For instance, during music classes, volunteers divide the group into theory and performance. While one group learns the notes of the piano, the other practices playing it. This rotation allows all students to engage actively in both aspects of music education. Additionally, we prioritize open communication, attentively listening to the children's interests and integrating them into our lessons. In sports, volunteers initially encountered a challenge with following the lesson plans, as all the children were fixated on playing "dog and the bone" once introduced. However, through open communication and mutual understanding, volunteers adapted their approach. For example, instead of simply running back with the ball, children had to practice dribbling skills. This adjustment not only maintained engagement but also facilitated skill development within the game.

We believe that our team are the right people to design and deliver this solution for two main reasons - our relationship with the community (government school) we teach, as well as our expertise. 

First, our relationship with the government school. We have extremely strong connections with the teachers, the NGO as well as with the children. Firstly, with the teachers, we have built a strong connection with them through going every week to the government school, conversing with them about the entire project as well as how the kids felt about it and they also helped us in translating instructions to the children sometimes, when there was a language barrier issue. Secondly, with the NGO who works with the school - Vidya, we have formed a connection with them, because they are the heads of the school, and are the people we go to for any sort of doubts or concerns. For example, at the very beginning of our project, we didn’t start going to the government school to teach, but first had to propose our idea to the NGO, where we had multiple rounds of discussion on whether our project was actually impactful and beneficial for the children or not. Through discussions such as these over the past year, we have been able to form a close connection with the NGO that the school works with. Lastly, with the children. We have been teaching them extracurricular activities for almost one year now, and through going to the school every week, and teaching them, we have been able to build a strong connection with them. For example, we have learnt a lot more about the children as well, such as their personal interests as well as their culture. We believe that these connections make us the right people to design and deliver this solution because it is meaningfully guided by the communities’ input, ideas and agendas. For example, when initially proposing our idea to the NGO, we took in their input of making all of the games in sports and songs in music, ways we could teach them English and develop their vocabulary. In music, we taught them songs such as ‘Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes’ and in sports, we played games such as ‘Dog & the Bone’ with them, to teach numbers. Here, we were able to better our solution through the communities’ agendas - which was teaching English. Another example of this was specifically in music, where the children also wanted to learn how to play their traditional Kannada songs on the instruments. Taking this idea into consideration, we taught them these songs on piano, to make their experience a lot more enjoyable, impactful and personal. 

Overall, along with having the right amount of expertise for the solution, we as a team also have formed strong connections with all the relevant stakeholders in the initiative - which have then helped us better our solution, taking in their ideas, inputs and agendas to create a larger impact.

We have been working on our solution for more than a year now - including the planning stage, as well as directly going to the government school and working with the children there. 

We have currently raised around Rs 30,000 through two Bake Sales we conducted at our school and through selling newspapers that we had at home. We have used around Rs 2,000 for buying supplies for sports such as a basketball hoop, cones and basketballs. Additionally, we have also bought paint brushes and paints. We have also conducted collection drives within our communities where we have received resources such as three guitars, two keyboards and around 15-20 artbooks. 

We have been working with the government school and the children for exactly 1 year now, going for one session every week - so around 45 to 50 sessions so far. We have worked with around 15-17 children in total. 

In visual arts, we have taught the children how to draw animals, still life, and the skills of using a variety of water colours including crayons, colour pencils and watercolors. This has taught them the skill of patience and creativity. 

In sports, we have taught the children ‘Dog & the Bone’, basic football skills such as dribbling and passing and basketball skills such as shooting, one-on-one defence and attack. We have also conducted assessments here, where we have seen their growth in speed, reaction time and more. This has taught them perseverance - to improve their skills, teamwork - in Dog & the Bone as well as sport-specific skills such as speed and endurance. 

Lastly, in music, we have taught them a few nursery rhymes both on piano as well as singing including ‘Head Shoulders Knees & Toes’, and ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’. We have also delved into music theory - teaching them chords, notes and rhythm. We also taught them the song ‘Heal the World’ by Michael Jackson to teach them about society and the power of words. We have conducted tests on music theory to check their understanding and plan sessions from there. Through music, the children have developed creativity and determination. 

We believe that Solve can help us develop our project through four ways: 

1. Finance: Although we have conducted a few bake sales and collection drives in the past, we believe that through Solve’s funding, we can easily look at funding for resources. Currently, since we only work at one government school, the money isn’t really a problem, as they don’t need too many resources. However, as we are looking to expand our project - move to many other government schools around Bengaluru, we believe that it is necessary for us to have a lot more resources for music, arts and sports, than we have right now. Solve’s prize helps us make the idea of expanding a reality, making collection of resources for a larger group of people a lot easier. 
2. Technical: Although our 1 year of working on Spartis has taught us a lot, we as high school students aren’t extremely familiar with the workings of an initiative, let alone an organisation. We think that Solve's 9 month support program through its tailored capacity workshops, leadership coaching, monitoring and evaluation can helps us learn the important skills required to generate an impact on communities as well as solve the problem of extracurricular access around places in our city and country. We are applying to Solve, so that we can learn the skills tailored to our project, to fulfil our mission and impact. 
3. Legal: The 9 month virtual support program by Solve helps us receive access to software licences and legal services that are currently extremely hard for us to do, as we are only in high school. We are extremely passionate about Spartis, and through Solve’s legal help, we can create it into more than just an initiative, and into an actual non-profit organisation, as we aim to continue to work on it even after we graduate. The legal services that Solve offers would be extremely helpful to us, given our age, which is also one of the main reasons we are applying to Solve. We aren’t extremely well-versed with the field, and with Solve’s help, we can become more aware and grow our initiative for further impact as well. 
4. Market: As said above, one of our main goals with Spartis is to also expand all around Bengaluru, our city, or even all around India, our country. Through Solve’s 9 month support program, we can get access to opportunities to connect and network with peers that can help us grow our project even further, and provide extracurricular education - our mission - to children all around India, who deserve it. Even though we can network throughout our school, we believe that Solve can help us move even further and generate a larger and better impact on the underprivileged children, which is the fourth reason we are applying. 

Overall, we believe that Solve has the right resources for us to grow as an organization and an impact on society, to create opportunities for more children around the city and the country. 

Our solution - Spartis, an initiative that aims to provide resources, and teach extracurricular activities of sports, music and visual arts - is extremely innovative to the problem of underprivileged children not having access to learning these extracurricular activities. We believe that this solution is innovative for the following reasons: 

Firstly, the issue. We think that in government schools the main priority is to teach traditional subjects such as maths and English so that the children can form a basic foundational understanding that they can then apply in other subjects such as science and humanities. However, after visiting many government schools through volunteering in our 8th grade, we believe that although traditional subjects are important, so are extracurricular activities - as we have been taught them in our school and outside as well, and understand the tangible impact they can have on us in the long run. We think that this problem isn’t widely recognized and isn’t widely addressed, making our solution one that is extremely innovative, because of the inherent fact that we are solving a problem that isn’t spoken about much. 

The second reason our solution is innovative is because it is initiated by high school students. Growing into a world that is constantly changing, we believe that we are able to adapt to these changes and develop the relevant skills required in modern society such as problem solving and critical thinking. Therefore, we believe that this solution is innovative because we, the youth are the ones growing into the world, and are some of the well-equipped people in terms of the skills required to navigate this changing world, as we are experiencing it first hand - whether it is in school or at home. 

The third reason our solution is innovative is because of a larger connection. Our long term intended impact is to equip these children with lifelong important skill such as perseverance, creativity and reflective thinking to help them create opportunities for themselves and transfer their learning from these extracurricular activities into the fields they choose to do when they grow up. Our solution is innovative because not only are we teaching them subject specific skills through extracurricular activities, but also lifelong skills that they can apply in a multitude of scenarios. 

To put it simply, we believe our solution, which in this case is our project, will have an immense impact on the children’s skill sets and conceptual understanding alongside exposing them to new disciplines and areas which they may develop a future interest in. The reason we believe our project is impactful is because the project is a long-term project. It involves us having a tangible, measurable impact on the children wherein we expose them to disciplines and teach them important skills such as teamwork, collaboration, strategising and using tactics, and more. In this project, we also focus on teaching the students English, be it during the disciplines where we associate gestures, activities and actions with English words, which they have shown considerable progress in learning, or be it the separate English classes we take for the students too. Our project shows a strong focus and connection to the children we teach, as the aim of the project is to provide them exposure to disciplines as from what we have observed, their current focus is towards academics and language to enable them for competitive examinations and job opportunities. Alongside this, we aim to teach and help them develop their skill sets, and build a sense of camaraderie amongst one another.

The common practice of measuring our solution is through monthly test for the children in all of the disciplines, and they have been curated to compliment the nature of the respective discipline. 

Art - We prepare mini worksheets beforehand, and during class, we sit in smaller groups. This allows the volunteers to focus on a smaller group and ensure the kids are doing the work on their own, which ultimately makes the impact more meaningful for them. These worksheets consist of drawing and writing practice (as discussed before, disciplines try to incorporate English into their lesson plans). For example, when we had the unit on shapes, we included questions where the kids had to name the shapes we drew, or they had to draw a given shape. These are just small but effective measures we take to ensure we are using both their and our time meaningfully.

Music - In music, we have conducted tests, where we essentially check the student’s understanding of what we have taught them so far, and then work backwards to plan further sessions. We conducted two types of tests - practical and theoretical. Practical tests include seeing whether the students can play what we taught them on instruments. For example, we conducted a test to see whether the students could sing the song ‘Heal the World’ that we had taught them, as well as play it on piano. Theoretical tests are written that test their knowledge on music theory. For example, after teaching them many concepts such as chords, notes and accidentals, we conducted a test, and were able to see that many of the children hadn’t understood accidentals completely, helping us understand where to focus on in the next few sessions. Tests or small progress-checkers like these helped us evaluate where the children are now, and how we can make the sessions better, more productive and engaging for them. 

Sports - Other than checking their progress every session by reviewing and practicing what we did last session, we have also done physical tests to track the development of the students. For example, initially we tracked the students' endurance, speed, reaction time and other factors, and then a month later, we did the test again, to see their development. This allowed us to see the effectiveness of our lesson plans and whether the students were able to build skills from our activities or not.

Currently, we do not have a major technology oriented plan, but we currently still use technology as aids towards what we teach to and do with the children. We are looking for mentorship as to how we can employ technology in innovative manners to create an even larger, more effective change in the children’s lives and education. When it comes to the act of taking assessments for the children, for example, physical assessments, wherein focus on measuring speed, reaction time, and jump height, for which we have used online applications and websites. We have used audio-visual mediums such as videos to show the children the songs they were being taught by us, alongside real-life examples of matches from the different sports and activities we conducted with them. We also taught them theory using technology, where we actively used technology to display images and simulations of playing fields, player lineups and positions, and drew the same on a chalkboard. We also used technology to conduct mini-analyses with the children wherein we analysed different matches that took place in order to understand the relevance of each player and their role in changing the direction of the match.

There are currently 11 people working on this project. 

Head of Logistics - Hana Yenepoya & Hrehaan Iyer

Head of Volunteers - Navya Khandelwal & Akshaya Prakash

Head of Social media & Website - Hana Yenepoya & Navya Khandelwal

Head of Sports - Dhruv Jain & Aarush Gupta

Head of Visual art - Rohini Arya & Mihira Patil

Head of Music - Neel Patel & Yash Reddy

Head of Finance - Nevyn Shah

We all work part-time, as we are high-schoolers entering 11th grade.

The planning process started from August 2022, where we discussed our idea with the school teachers and worked on streamlining our mission and intended impact. This time also included pitching the idea to a government school and the NGO that ran it to get their inputs and permission to start teaching.

We started the initiative on 25th February 2023, and have been going regularly every Wednesday for 2 hours (there have been some gaps in the timeline due to exams, and more). Every volunteer has done 40+ hours of service.

As a large group, we harness our collective strength by leveraging each member's expertise and assigning them meaningful roles within the project. For instance, students with a passion for and proficiency in math handle financial records, while those skilled in organization focus on event planning and maintaining meticulous files of our work. Moreover, within our working environment, we divide the children from the government school into smaller groups, this essentially ensures that every volunteer dedicates their time to meaningful activities tailored to the specific needs of the children they mentor. 

Throughout our journey, we have not only fostered individual growth but also cultivate effective communication skills, ensuring alignment and clarity in our shared objectives. Our diversity comes with our skill sets, even within specific disciplines, with each volunteer bringing their unique interests and talents to the table. For example, in music, we have pianists, guitarists, singers, and more, offering the children a myriad of opportunities for the eventual exploration of the same skills.

Our main plan for becoming financially sustainable was by conducting fundraisers such as bake sales and creating a donation link for interested people to donate to the cause. Although this model seems rather simple, it has worked for us so far, as we have raised Rs 30,000, which has been enough for us to use up till now. We have used this money to buy resources to teach the extracurriculars such as paints for arts, cones for sports and instruments for music. However, we are planning on brainstorming and planning more ways to become financially sustainable, so that when we expand our project, there isn’t a strain on the project in terms of the money required.