Chief Secretary Aditya Prasad Padhi on Thursday flagged off mobile school and community science laboratories for five blocks of southern Odisha. The vehicles moved towards the respective blocks from the State Secretariat premises.
Padhi told reporters that this initiative has been started by the State Government in collaboration with the TCS Foundation and the Tata Trust. The initiative aims at creating an environment of learning excellence in south Odisha through engagement of multi stakeholders including community, schools, teachers and students.
Tata Trust Regional Manager Jitendra Nayak said the vehicles would cover the blocks of Muniguda, Bissamcuttack, Thuamul Rampur, lanjigarh and Kothgarh. The vehicles were designed as multi-purpose mobile labs and would cover all primary and secondary schools in these blocks.
Available data show that around 25,000 students of 250 elementary and secondary schools would get exciting learning experiences through th vehicles, which are equipped with equipments, application models and charts as per the curricular needs of the schools. They also carry all audiovisual apparatus like TV, projector, audio amplifier and solar power backups to support science and math learning through audiovisual communication and simulation experiments. The vehicles have been fitted with GPS trackers to provide real time data on movement of the labs.
NGOs, teachers and community members have been tagged up with the programme to make it broad-based and outcome-oriented.