I’d been to Parikrama once, a month or so ago, and had a very good time with the kids there. They were kids coming from various slums, but being given ICSE level education, including things like sports and art and things like that. In fact they’ve used the walls and compound of the building itself as a painting project and painted flowers and all kinds of lovely things. I promised to visit them again, one that I’m yet to keep.
Last time Vivek – a truly extraordinary gentleman whom I had known as a friend through email, went around introducing me to each classroom. He asked the kids what I did for a living, and some of them were able to guess, after seeing the company logo on my tshirt! With great delight he noted discreetly to me – “see, these were kids from slums who are guessing this way, who so far had almost no exposure to the outside world at all!!”
Later on we went to a 7th standard class where the kids were older, and then someone asked me what I do. I told them I’m a programmer. But of course I couldn’t just leave it at that – someone asked me what that meant… I really wanted them to understand – these kids were really wonderful – they had the curiosity to learn!
I asked them a counter question – whats a computer? There were different answers – mostly text book answers – someone answered that it has wires and electrical things inside it. Then I asked them, so does a washing machine – so whats the difference between them. I cant remember the exact conversation, but at some point I made a joke and a lot of kids laughed – that was a really great feeling! Eventually I told them the difference between a washing machine and a computer is that one can tell a computer what to do. It can be made to serve people. And that’s what a programmer does – he tells a computer what to do!
And then Vivek asked them, what would *you* want the computer to do? They gave all kinds of answers, but finally we found that nobody knew the computer could talk. So I was assigned the task of making the computer talk. I had no idea how, but anyway I knew something would happen, so I said ok lets see.
Later on I went down, and in the lab I found that apart from Office XP which has a text to speech engine, I could also use Microsoft Narrator. So I got an idea – I thought of some typical questions, then typed some answers in a notepad window, and then called the kids. I asked them to ask the computer questions. Then when they asked, I highllighted one of the answers and to their surpise, the computer spoke the words out! I had the Narrotor configured to speak out selected text. If the answers werent already there, I typed them in to add to the list, being a speed typist helps, and then it spoke the answer. I could even manage to make it speak Kannada sentences as well!
Anyway… for next time I have the following possibilities:
– ask Vivek what they need – last time he had said that he needs software and some hardware (Dell has donated an entire computer lab of around 15 pretty good PCs, and he was hinting indirectly that surely there must be something HP can do as well 😉 )
– teach any interested kids chess (though not an expert, I’m somewhat at amatuer+ level)
– take pictures of some kids with my camera and make some art work out of them.
