From Petals to DNA: Starting a Hands-On Science Journey in Palsunde
Palsunde Village
Tinkering at the Edges: Why We Work Where We Do
At Scigram, we believe that meaningful transformation in education does not emerge from theoretical white papers or strategic offsites—it begins on the ground, amid the dust, noise, and constraints of real life. Our mission is rooted in two interlinked initiatives: Metaknowledger, a radical learning framework that bridges computational thinking with hands-on STEM exploration using a toolkit of open-source hardware platforms such as Arduino, Raspberry Pi, BBC micro:bit, and other accessible, low-cost systems.. Through Metaknowledger, we cultivate not just technical fluency but systems thinking—empowering students to understand, model, and shape the complex realities they inhabit. Our second initiative, VillageOS, is an open-source blueprint for community resilience: a fusion of social systems, ecological literacy, and local ingenuity designed to reimagine development from the grassroots. Together, they represent our commitment to build epistemic agency and engineering imagination in places too often overlooked.
Over the years, our work has spanned tribal Ashram schools in remote Western Ghats landscapes, where young learners are often cut off from both infrastructure and imagination. Our approach is not to disseminate knowledge top-down, but to tinker alongside students, question inherited assumptions, and co-create new ways of learning that emerge from lived realities. We build not just educational capacity, but epistemic agency—one experiment at a time.
In December 2024, we found ourselves once again drawn to the foothills of the Western Ghats, returning to Palsunde Ashram School for a three-day immersion. At first glance, the visit looked like a simple outreach effort—some equipment, hands-on activities, and conversations with students and teachers. But something more meaningful was unfolding. This wasn’t just about teaching new content; it was about exploring how curiosity could grow in a setting shaped by limited infrastructure, interrupted electricity, and improvised classrooms. What we witnessed wasn’t a scripted lesson but a process of learning shaped by real-time engagement and adaptation. The school became a space of experimentation—where knowledge emerged through interaction, not delivery. It reminded us that, in places like Palsunde, education is not about transferring information, but about creating the conditions where understanding can take root.
Palsunde: A Village, A School, A Starting Point
Palsunde lies tucked into the folds of the Western Ghats, that ancient mountain spine whose contours shape both climate and culture across peninsular India. Spread over some 878 hectares in Akole Taluka of Ahmednagar district, the village is home to roughly 1,440 people—most of them from Scheduled Tribes whose presence in the region predates the state's bureaucratic maps. It is a place of vivid contradictions: where dense forests and monsoon-fed streams frame a landscape of quiet fecundity, yet life is often edged with precarity. Subsistence farming anchors the local economy, but it is a livelihood increasingly vulnerable to erratic weather and unstable markets, compelling many families into seasonal migration. Infrastructure here is more promise than presence; electricity flickers unreliably, mobile networks fade into silence, and the pathways to healthcare or education are less linear routes than acts of endurance. In this sense, Palsunde exemplifies the structural paradox of many tribal geographies in India—ecologically rich, yet systematically sidelined. The terrain that nourishes biodiversity also enforces a kind of social seclusion, insulating the village not only from urban sprawl but from the circuits of opportunity and support that define modern life.
Palsunde village area with the Ashram School shown within a 0.5 km circle. Palsunde village location shown on the street map.The Government Ashram School in Palsunde is one of the few institutional anchors in the village. It provides residential education for tribal children, with separate facilities for boys and girls. As is typical of many such Ashram schools, it was originally set up with the vision of providing both shelter and learning for students who might otherwise be cut off from formal education. However, the school has long grappled with serious systemic challenges: chronic understaffing, undertrained or overburdened teachers, a curriculum that often feels abstracted from students’ lived realities, and a near-total absence of digital infrastructure. Despite these challenges, the school has remained a vital node of opportunity and aspiration for the local community.
It is here that Kadam Sir, the current principal of Palsunde Ashram School, has played a pivotal role. A postgraduate in chemistry, he was initially posted as a mathematics teacher, reflecting the shortage of subject-specific faculty in many tribal schools. I first met him over a decade ago during my early visits to Ashram schools in Rajur, Mutkhel, Mhanere, and Ghatghar between 2014 and 2015. Even then, he radiated a rare kind of attentiveness—not just to the syllabus, but also in his genuine concern about the growing digital divide that was leaving tribal students even further behind. This divide was not simply a matter of missing computers or internet; it was compounded by language barriers, lack of local-language digital content, poor infrastructure, and a pedagogy that treated technology as an add-on rather than a language of expression and exploration. When he heard about our Raspberry Pi workshops, he invited us to conduct sessions at his school, eager to expose his students to the world of computational thinking.
In 2017, when he was transferred to Maveshi Ashram School—a better-equipped campus with more students—Kadam Sir saw an opportunity to bring systemic change. He organized a workshop and invited teachers from surrounding Ashram schools, providing us with a platform to showcase the possibilities of Raspberry Pi and computational thinking. However, the response was lukewarm. The teachers, although physically present, were overwhelmed by the unfamiliarity of the technology. Many attended only to fulfill bureaucratic requirements, not out of genuine interest. As we’ve seen time and again in our interactions with educators in these schools, there's often a deep-seated fear of technology—fueled by lack of exposure, outdated training, and absence of meaningful incentives for self-improvement. The state-mandated training programs have become box-ticking exercises rather than engines of transformation. Still, Kadam Sir persisted, recognizing that seeding such ideas was a slow process—requiring patience, persistence, and the right moments to strike.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Kadam Sir was appointed principal of Palsunde Ashram School with the grim mandate to oversee its closure due to poor enrollment and prolonged neglect. But having worked with us for years, he saw this moment not as an end but as a beginning. Seizing the autonomy that came with his new position, he reached out to us with renewed purpose. "Now I’m the principal—we don’t need anyone’s permission to start our work," he declared. It was not our first collaboration—it was a continuation of a shared journey. This time, though, he wasn’t a teacher inviting us into a system—he was leading the transformation from within it.
With renewed energy, he built bridges with the local community, convincing parents to re-enroll their children. His efforts have led to a rise in student numbers, and today the school is undergoing a revival—with new hostel construction and infrastructural upgrades underway.
Turning Classrooms Inside Out: A Hands-On Approach to Learning
Our December 2024 visit was shaped by a simple premise: that meaningful learning begins with doing. In a setting where abstract concepts often fail to resonate, we focused on hands-on activities rooted in everyday materials and local context. Each session was designed not just to teach, but to invite curiosity—to let students build, question, and discover through direct engagement.
Introductions on the first day included an explanation of Metaknowledger, Computational Thinking, and tinkering activities.Foundations First: Understanding Learners Before We Begin
Before we could introduce circuits, code, or hands-on activities, we needed to ask a more basic but essential question: What do these students already know—and how do they know it? Not in terms of textbook recitation, but in the deeper sense: how do they reason, estimate, imagine, and pattern the world around them? What cognitive habits had their surroundings cultivated—and what blind spots had their schooling, or lack thereof, imposed?
The setting was hardly ideal for digital diagnostics. At Palsunde, there were perhaps two working computers, power cuts were frequent, and the internet was more idea than infrastructure. And yet, we were convinced that a test could be designed not merely in spite of these constraints, but through them—using them as a kind of design brief for a new kind of assessment. It would be language-minimal, and mobile-friendly. We needed something different: a diagnostic tool aligned with our Metaknowledger philosophy that true learning lives not in recitation but in thought. Something between a puzzle and a conversation, more an invitation to think than a test to pass or fail.
What came out of this was a carefully designed question bank—starting with ten exploratory prompts and growing into a larger diagnostic tool tailored for tribal students in rural Maharashtra. It’s now available publicly at scigram.org/stem-questions. The questions were bilingual (Marathi with English technical terms), graduated in difficulty, and rooted in familiar rural contexts. They didn’t begin with formulas or definitions, but with daily experiences—shadows on fields, bullock-cart wheels, pH of local soil.
Each subject was re-imagined with this ethos. Physics included not only classical mechanics and optics, but also questions on thermal regulation inside mud houses and the physics of water flow in irrigation channels. Chemistry touched on fertilizers and batteries, while Biology invoked crop genetics, plant disease, and the role of microbes in composting. Mathematics didn’t stop at geometry or percentages—it explored how to calculate yield per acre, plan a budget for buying seeds, or estimate drone spray coverage. There were questions about ISRO missions, climate change, soil health, modern sensors, and even GIS mapping—what watershed they were a part of, how to read topography, or identify their school on Google Earth.
The way the test was conducted was also telling. With few digital devices available, the school made a collective decision: every teacher lent their phone. A few villagers offered theirs too. Over the course of a week, all students from Grades 6 to 9 took the test—on the roof gallery of the school building, where the mobile signal was slightly stronger. Some teachers even asked their own children in other schools to participate, treating the test as both assessment and experiment. It was, in many ways, a communal act of faith in their children’s minds.
Students take the STEM diagnostic test from the rooftop—the only spot with reliable network access.Most revealing, perhaps, was what the test illuminated—not only about the students, but about us. We realized how deeply rural learners craved relevance. They didn’t need dumbed-down content—they needed content that spoke their language, literally and metaphorically. They were not intimidated by modern science; they were disoriented by its abstraction. And when the context was right, the spark was immediate.
In the end, this diagnostic wasn’t just a test. It was a mirror—held up not only to the children, but to our assumptions as educators, and to the educational system at large. It showed us the cognitive and cultural terrain we must cross—and reminded us that every meaningful intervention starts by listening first.
Conversations with Teachers: Questions, Openness, and Possibilities
While the first batch of students was taking the STEM test, we took the opportunity to engage with the teachers—many of whom had little idea about the program or the rationale behind it. The concept of computational thinking, let alone tinkering, was unfamiliar terrain. A few teachers were visibly intrigued, asking thoughtful questions and expressing genuine excitement about what it could mean for their students. But the dominant mood was one of uncertainty—curiosity mixed with quiet resistance. “How can I contribute to STEM?” asked an English teacher, anxious about his role. It was a telling moment, reflective of a system that has long compartmentalized disciplines and stripped teachers of creative agency.
While students took the diagnostic test, we engaged teachers in open conversations—clarifying our approach, addressing doubts, and beginning to unpack deeper systemic challenges.We explained the philosophy behind Metaknowledger—that this wasn’t about producing technocrats or importing yet another buzzword, but about nurturing systems thinking and problem-solving across domains. That language, history, and science were not separate silos but different lenses to interpret the world. And that their role as facilitators of curiosity and exploration was more essential than ever.
But beneath these conversations lay a harder truth—one we have come to recognize in almost every tribal school we’ve worked with. The single most entrenched impediment to transformative education isn’t infrastructure. It’s the teachers. Or rather, the culture that has calcified around the role of a teacher. Most are not here out of passion or purpose. They’re here for the job security, the regular income, and—compared to other rural professions—the relatively undemanding work. For many, teaching has become a bureaucratic routine, devoid of reflection or reinvention. Learning new technologies? Embracing novel pedagogies? For most, these are seen not as opportunities but as burdens. And the system lets them off the hook.
Yet—and this is important—every school has a handful of devoted teachers. People who care, who try, who show up for their students even when the system doesn’t show up for them. Tragically, these individuals often operate in isolation. Instead of being celebrated, they are met with ridicule. Their colleagues mock them for “making life difficult” by taking teaching seriously. They receive little institutional support, no professional development, and are left to navigate a sea of apathy on their own. These are the teachers the system is quietly eroding, one discouragement at a time.
What makes this more tragic is the creeping emergence of another pandemic in these schools—one not caused by viruses but by optics. A kind of performative education culture, where every event, every classroom activity, every festival or visitor interaction is staged like an Instagram reel. The priority is no longer learning—it’s documentation. Photos are taken, videos choreographed, filters applied, captions added. Even in places where students barely understand the concepts, teachers are preoccupied with staging the moment to prove something happened. It’s as if education has become a simulation—an ephemeral social media feed meant to satisfy bureaucrats, not students. This isn’t unique to tribal schools; it’s symptomatic of a national malaise. But here, in these vulnerable ecosystems, the disconnect is especially jarring.
A universal complaint among staff was the burden of non-teaching responsibilities imposed by government authorities. To some extent, this is a valid grievance. The higher bureaucracy is often equally complicit in this dystopia—generating mountains of paperwork, reports, and compliance forms that have little to do with student learning. But what we observed was more alarming: the work being assigned was not always unreasonable. In fact, it could often be done efficiently with basic digital tools. Yet most teachers lacked even fundamental computer literacy. Their attempts at completing tasks were painfully inefficient—pencil-and-paper lists later transcribed with one-finger typing, Excel sheets mangled into Word documents, PDFs printed just to be re-scanned. One couldn’t help but wonder how they had cleared the recruitment process in the first place.
This incompetence is not just a technical issue—it’s symptomatic of a deeper disengagement with the very idea of learning. The same teachers who lament the students’ lack of skills have long stopped being learners themselves. And in such an ecosystem, innovation becomes ornamental—something to be performed for visitors, not integrated into the life of the school.
We’ve come to learn this through lived experience: students are never the bottleneck. These so-called “little devils”, as they're affectionately dubbed, will absorb anything you throw at them—tinkering, technology, design, logic puzzles—with mischievous delight and boundless enthusiasm. But the teachers? They are the wall. And this is perhaps the most formidable challenge before us: How do we bring these inert custodians into the fold—not as passive carriers of tradition but as active agents of transformation?
It’s clear we need a systemic rethinking. Not top-down training modules or hollow motivational workshops, but a deeper design logic that continuously engages teachers, nudges them forward, holds them accountable, and shows them—not tells them—the joy and necessity of becoming learners again. Without this, we are merely pouring fresh ideas into a sieve. To turn this education effort into a true revolution, we don’t just need tools and platforms. We need a strategy to rewire the very people who were meant to be its custodians.
Color, Chemistry, and Curiosity: Exploring Acids and Bases with Petals
To introduce an important chemical principle—acidity and alkalinity—we sought an approach that would not only ground the concept in the students' daily lives but also break free from the stale conventions of classroom instruction. This wasn’t going to be about PowerPoint slides or dry textbook passages. The idea was to offer a visceral encounter with chemistry—an experience that could be seen, touched, and understood intuitively. Something closer to alchemy than rote learning.
We turned to an unexpected yet entirely local tool: hibiscus flowers. These vibrant blooms, plucked straight from the school garden, became our conduit for exploring the invisible world of acids and bases. When crushed in water, the petals yield a deep red solution rich in anthocyanins—a class of flavonoid pigments found in many red, purple, and blue plants. These molecules act as natural pH indicators because their chromophore—the part of the molecule responsible for color—is highly sensitive to the concentration of hydrogen ions (H⁺) in solution.
Chemically speaking, anthocyanins exist in different ionic forms depending on the pH of the surrounding medium. In an acidic environment, the flavylium cation predominates, producing red hues. As the pH rises toward neutral, the molecule undergoes structural transformations—hydroxylation and deprotonation—leading to a purple coloration. In basic conditions, the anthocyanins further convert into quinonoidal bases and other ionic structures, producing blue or green shades. These transformations are not only reversible but vividly visible, making hibiscus extract a powerful, low-cost, and intuitive tool for visualizing pH gradients in real time.
Exploring pH through hibiscus: from molecular structure of anthocyanins to vivid color changes in acidic, neutral, and basic solutions—connecting chemistry to everyday life with petals, not pH paper.In acidic solutions like lemon juice, the hibiscus extract turned a vivid red; in neutral liquids like milk, it took on a gentle purplish tone; and in basic environments, the mixture veered into bluish and greenish hues. With nothing more than flowers and a few everyday materials, the students watched as chemistry revealed itself through living color.
As we formed small groups and let them loose with local soil, lemons, soap water, and milk, the activity quickly turned electric. Children scrambled to the school kitchen, checked every available household item, and experimented with childlike fervor. The humble hibiscus, so familiar as to be invisible, had suddenly become magical. “We don’t need pH paper anymore!” one child exclaimed, eyes wide. “I never knew this flower could show pH!” said another, now plotting how to test the soil back home in their family’s farm. This was precisely our intent: to make science erupt into their world with joy and purpose. Chemistry, once distant and abstract, had found its footing in their gardens, kitchens, and imaginations.
Students test local soil samples using hibiscus extract as a natural pH indicator—linking chemistry with farming in a hands-on, meaningful way.And it wasn’t just the students. One teacher, visibly moved by the exercise, went home that evening and tested his own backyard soil. The next morning, he returned beaming. “I’ve always thought soil testing was something only a lab could do. But now I know I can do it myself—right in my own field.” This quiet revelation was perhaps more powerful than any formal training—because it emerged from the lived immediacy of experience, not the abstract authority of instruction.
The true moment of resonance came during the soil testing at school. Students applied their hibiscus solutions to soil samples brought from the schoolyard and nearby farms, observing color changes that unveiled the pH of their local land. For many, this wasn’t just a demonstration—it was a decoding of the very terrain their families farm. They could now see, with their own eyes, how soil chemistry affects crop growth, nutrient uptake, and harvest outcomes.
This deceptively simple exercise did more than demystify acids and bases. It transformed an abstract scientific concept into an agricultural tool. It collapsed the boundary between classroom and field, between theory and survival. And it reminded us once again: science is not foreign to these children. It lives around them—in the plants they pass on their way to school, in the food they grow, in the soil they play on. Our task is not to import knowledge from elsewhere, but to reveal it where it already lives.
Mapping Their World: Hills, Heights, and Local Geography
What does it mean to know a place—not just to live in it, but to see it, interpret it, and shape it? To unravel this question, we turned geography into an instrument of discovery, and Palsunde—once just a name on an attendance register—became a dynamic subject of inquiry.
We began by introducing the students to tools like QGIS and Mathematica, not as complex software platforms, but as modern lenses through which to perceive their world. With official boundary maps and open satellite data, we located their village and projected it, glowing and pixelated, onto the classroom wall. The room stirred with energy. Laughter erupted as students identified the speck that was their school, traced the footpaths they walked daily, and pointed out their homes—each one a tiny coordinate in a vast digital mosaic.
For many, it was the first time they had seen their village from above—an aerial view that inverted their usual perception of the world and gave it new coherence. Distances once walked became measurable in meters; directions once told became mappable vectors. This wasn’t geography in the abstract. This was orientation as empowerment.
Visualizing Palsunde from above—students explored terrain using relief and 3D geo-elevation maps, uncovering how elevation shapes water flow, farming, and village planning.The journey deepened as we layered in NASA’s elevation data to build 3D terrain models. With a few lines of code and open datasets, the landscape rose from the screen in jagged folds and gentle contours. Hills, once mere backdrops to daily life, now had shape and slope. Valleys became more than low ground—they were arteries for water, spaces for farming, places of vulnerability and opportunity. Through simulation, we explored how water flows along gradients, why some areas flood while others parch, and how topography dictates not just where crops thrive, but where homes can safely stand.
Suddenly, geography was not passive—it was active. A terrain map wasn’t just a diagram; it was a decision-making tool. Students began asking questions that moved beyond memorization: Could we grow rice on this slope? What happens if the rain increases? Could we redirect water to another field? With every layer added, from roads to vegetation to elevation, a richer story emerged—one where their village was not an isolated dot on a static map, but a dynamic system of interactions, constraints, and possibilities.
Perhaps most importantly, this activity redefined maps themselves—not as finished products handed down by others, but as tools they could design, edit, and interrogate. They weren’t just reading geography; they were becoming geographers.
In a landscape defined by undulating terrain and unpredictable rainfall, this new perspective held immense practical power. They saw that data—once abstract and distant—was embedded in the land around them. With access to the right tools and the curiosity to wield them, they could make sense of their environment, plan more wisely, and respond more resiliently to the changes it brings.
From Ground to Graph: Measuring Soil with Microcontrollers
Having already explored the pH of soil using hibiscus extract—watching it shift colors like a living litmus—we decided to probe the soil further. If acidity tells us what kind of nutrients the soil might bind or release, conductivity reveals how much the soil can hold and transmit. The students had tasted the thrill of discovery once; now, we turned that curiosity toward another hidden variable in their fields: electrical conductivity.
The setup remained grounded in our core principles—tinkering, hands-on inquiry, and using open-source, low-cost hardware that students can fabricate, code, and adapt to real-world problems. In this case, a BBC micro:bit served as the brain, galvanized iron nails as electrodes, and the soil beneath their feet as the test subject. No fancy lab. No proprietary kits. Just accessible tools made powerful through purpose.
We explained the basic science: soil conductivity isn’t just about electricity—it’s a reflection of ion mobility. Dissolved salts, moisture content, and the presence of minerals like potassium and calcium—all contribute to how well the soil can carry current. The more ions available, the higher the conductivity. It’s the same principle behind electrolyte solutions in batteries, except here, the earth itself becomes the medium.
Students use BBC micro:bit to measure soil conductivity—combining coding, electronics, and agricultural science to understand the land beneath their feet.Students inserted the nails into different soil samples—dry, moist, clayey, sandy—and wired them into the micro:bit, which they had already programmed to read analog values. The micro:bit acted as a voltmeter of sorts, detecting the subtle shifts in resistance between the electrodes. Instantly, they saw the numbers flicker across the screen. Dry soils showed high resistance (low conductivity); damp, mineral-rich soils showed the opposite. The numbers weren’t just digits—they were signatures of the land’s capacity to nourish life.
The classroom transformed into a live lab. Students began experimenting—some added saltwater, others mixed soil types, a few tested waterlogged samples. They debated readings, interpreted differences, and started relating conductivity to what they’d observed in their farms. “This soil holds water better,” one said. “No wonder we plant onions here.”
The power of the moment was not in the gadget—it was in what it revealed. A simple DIY experiment linked physics, chemistry, agriculture, and computing. It showed them that technology is not something imported, but something you build, question, and wield. It doesn’t have to be expensive or remote. It can be embedded in the soil, stitched into local knowledge, and guided by curiosity.
And in that moment, something shifted. The ground beneath them—once just dirt—became data. And more importantly, it became theirs.
Touching the Code of Life: DNA in Their Hands
By now, the students had touched the chemistry of petals, mapped the contours of their hills, and tested the secrets of their soil. The journey had been outward. It was time to go inward—to the code within.
The transition was sparked, curiously enough, by snack wrappers. While reading nutrition labels, the conversation turned to carbohydrates and fats, then proteins, and finally to the fourth and most enigmatic class: nucleic acids. What followed wasn’t a lecture, but a layered unveiling. Carbohydrates were explained as the primary fuels, fats as insulators and energy reserves, proteins as cellular workhorses. But nucleic acids—DNA and RNA—were something else entirely. They weren’t just ingredients of the body. They were blueprints—the silent code behind every form and function.
To move beyond words, we gave form to abstraction. Using tomatoes and everyday materials—soap, salt, and alcohol—we invited the students to extract the code of life with their own hands. First, the tomatoes were mashed, rupturing the rigid cell walls and spilling the cytoplasmic soup. Then came the soap—not just for cleaning, but for its amphiphilic properties. It tore through the phospholipid bilayers of the cell and nuclear membranes, releasing the DNA and entangled proteins within. Salt was added to shield the negative charges along the DNA’s phosphate backbone, allowing the long strands to clump and coil. Finally, with the careful addition of chilled alcohol—layered atop the aqueous mixture—came the moment of revelation: ghostly white threads rising through the interphase, slow and delicate like unraveling mist.
The science behind it was no less beautiful than the sight. DNA, though invisible in cells, is a massive polymer composed of repeating nucleotide units. Its solubility in water and insolubility in alcohol make it separable by the simplest of means. This molecular logic—the same in every tomato, every student, every living organism—became suddenly tactile.
And that tactility changed everything.
From nutrients to nucleic acids—students moved from understanding biomolecules on the blackboard to extracting DNA from tomatoes with everyday materials, turning abstract biology into something they could see and hold.A hush fell again as the DNA began to rise like fog in the chilled alcohol—gossamer strands from another world, suddenly visible. This time, we worked in batches, inviting every student to take part in this almost alchemical moment. In some classes, we demonstrated to the whole group; in others, they formed clusters, each with a test tube in hand, watching intently as the invisible became tangible. The room shifted. No longer passive listeners, the students became experimenters, their eyes fixed with a kind of reverence. Some leaned in closer, turning the tubes in the light, trying to make sense of the delicate threads suspended before them.
“This is what we’ve been mugging and rotting for all this time—now I actually understand,” one said, the frustration of rote learning momentarily eclipsed by wonder. And it was written all over their faces—curiosity, questions, the quiet thrill of comprehension. For many, this was their first encounter with biology not as abstract symbols or exam fodder, but as something lived, felt, and profoundly real.
We pressed on. DNA wasn’t just about inheritance; it was information. We described it as a molecular script—adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine—writing instructions that shaped everything from eye color to disease resistance. They were intrigued to learn how this same molecule was decoded in forensic labs to solve crimes, in clinics to detect genetic disorders, and in biotech labs to develop cures. Even the concept of DNA computing—a technology in which sequences of nucleotides act as logic gates—landed with surprising clarity. The idea that biology could compute astonished them.
What began with a tomato ended in transformation. Genetics was no longer a distant topic buried in textbooks. It was something living in their hands and, more importantly, in themselves. Through this one experiment, the students glimpsed something larger: that life, in all its complexity, is written in a language—and that they had just begun to learn how to read it.
One teacher from a nearby Zilla Parishad school had joined the session, drawn by what might be called professional curiosity—that peculiar mixture of skepticism and hope that characterizes educators who have witnessed too many short-lived interventions. He sat toward the back, observing the process with the same attentiveness as the students.
As the DNA strands emerged—delicate threads suspended in alcohol—his demeanor shifted from passive interest to engaged wonder. He leaned forward, almost instinctively, as if trying to resolve how something so abstract could suddenly become visible. “Can we really see DNA with the naked eye?” he asked aloud, echoing the very question stirring in his students’ minds. It was a moment that revealed something more than fascination—it revealed shared inquiry, the spark of learning ignited not just in the young, but in the educator too. For someone trained in a system where biology is taught primarily through diagrams and definitions, this materialization of the previously abstract represented a profound pedagogical possibility.
After the session, he stayed back to talk. The excitement in his voice was unmistakable. “I want to try this at my school,” he said. “They’ve never seen science like this.” We began an impromptu discussion—What would it take to replicate this? What support would he need? At one point, he paused, reflective, then offered, “Could we get a more powerful microscope? Maybe the villagers can contribute—we can ask them.” It wasn’t a rhetorical question. It was an earnest, grounded step toward continuation. His questions weren’t just about tools, but about possibilities. How do we take this further? How do we sustain the momentum?
He wasn’t alone in that impulse. Like the students, he had crossed an invisible threshold—from spectator to participant, from instructor to co-learner. Such moments of teacher transformation, though easily overlooked in conventional impact assessments, may ultimately prove more consequential than any direct student outcomes.
The Road Forward: Building on What Emerged
Palsunde is not just a location—it’s a living classroom, where students, teachers, and the wider community are eager to engage, question, and build. Over the course of our first intervention, we witnessed how curiosity spreads when sparked by hands-on exploration. What began as a set of science activities evolved into something deeper: a shared momentum toward learning, problem-solving, and rethinking what education can look like—even in areas with limited transport, infrastructure, or external support.
The response from both students and teachers was stronger than expected. As activities unfolded, many teachers became more convinced that hands-on, inquiry-driven methods could work within their classrooms. Several expressed interest in understanding these approaches more deeply and adapting them to their daily teaching practice.
The students, too, responded with enthusiasm and initiative. They weren’t just participants—they became experimenters and problem-solvers. Some began testing soil samples at home, while others explained DNA extraction or chromatography to family members. Our biodiversity walk through the nearby hills became a memorable moment: students identified local plant species, gathered petal samples, and later extracted pigments to understand plant chemistry. It sparked discussions about local ecosystems, conservation, and even the changing climate. These are conversations we hope to build into future sessions—especially around the potential links between science, biodiversity, and agriculture. Can students monitor soil health, understand pest resistance, or design local farming experiments? These are possibilities we’re actively exploring.
The excitement wasn’t limited to the classroom. Several villagers stopped by during our sessions—curious, welcoming, and happy that someone was working with the children in a place often bypassed even by state-run transport. These informal exchanges felt just as meaningful as the planned lessons. They grounded our work in the everyday rhythms of village life, and reminded us that any meaningful educational change must stay rooted in local realities.
Looking ahead, our focus is on strengthening and scaling this model. In the coming months, we plan to:
Develop a structured curriculum that integrates hands-on science and computing with the state syllabus, enabling teachers to adopt these methods without sacrificing syllabus coverage.
Build a teacher support network to share ideas, troubleshoot challenges, and develop context-relevant solutions collaboratively.
Set up a compact tinkering and computing facility that can be shared across nearby schools—especially where dedicated infrastructure is lacking. This will include essential tools for electronics, experimentation, and coding, along with additional Raspberry Pi units to ensure smaller working groups, ideally one device per three students.
Continue developing biodiversity-linked learning activities, and begin piloting modules that explore the intersections of science and agriculture—soil testing, composting, plant growth experiments, and basic weather monitoring.
Document and openly share our tools, methods, and learning designs so they’re accessible to others working in similar geographies.
This was just the first leg of a longer journey. We’ll return soon for our next round of sessions, ready to build on what worked, improve where needed, and deepen our engagement with the students, teachers, and local community. Our aim remains simple: to equip learners with tools they can use to ask questions, test ideas, and solve problems that matter to them—one experiment at a time.
