October 2019 | Boston

Software programmers from OLE Nepal attended MIT J-WEL Week on October 28-31, 2019 in Boston, where J-WEL collaborators from 33 countries convened for seminars, presentations, research briefs, hands-on exercises, panel discussions, and workshops. Throughout the program, in collaboration with MIT faculty and staff, members were exposed to new education research at MIT and explored mechanisms for implementation. The week started off with a series of innovation showcase product pitches from J-WEL grantees. OLE Nepal’s Programmer Regan Maharjan delivered the product pitch. After the pitch, Regan and Ravi Karki from OLE Nepal and Meghana Vemulapalli from MIT participated in the innovation showcase where they shared the on-going work on game development under the project “Learning Games for Middle School Maths and Science in Nepal and Beyond”.

Highlights of J-WEL week were (i) ‘AI + Ethics in the Classroom’ session by Prof. Cynthia Breazeal that focused on the tools, trends, applications and democratization of artificial intelligence(AI), as well as its challenges and negative implications; (ii) ‘Inventing through Toy Design’ led by Prof. Maria Yang, a hands-on session in which teams design an effective rainwater harvesting toy model; and, (iii) a school tour of Wellan Montessori School to learn about their innovative approach and applications towards learning.

Regan and Ravi also took this opportunity to attend classes at MIT that would complement their work in the J-WEL project. They joined Prof. Eric Klopfer’s class on existing biases in schools and Prof. Phillip Tan’s class on game design at the MIT Media Lab. 

OLE Nepal is one of the awardees of the  MIT J-WEL grant in pK-12 Education Innovation Grant 2019. The collaboration is part of the MIT-Nepal Initiative program. Under this project, OLE Nepal is working to develop advanced learning games for math and science through joint collaboration between OLE Nepal, MIT instructors and students, and leveraging various methods and approaches to game-development that are taught at MIT. This project aims to promote STEM education in middle schools, and look beyond curriculum to explore games as a tool to learn concepts and promote critical thinking by engaging students through game based learning opportunities. 

The MIT J-WEL program for pK-12 is reinventing pre-school, elementary, middle, and high school education to develop communities of the future thinkers and doers of the planet by engaging growing numbers of diverse learners and educators through design, research and implementation of educational innovations.