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Challenges and Lessons from Development of a Training Program to Inculcate a Culture of Innovation in High Schools

Narendra Chirmule

There is an urgent need to create a scalable process for innovation and an atmosphere for scientific enquiry in high schools. The importance of personalized education, social and emotional learnings are becoming a critical requirement in high schools to create a future society that is caring to others and our planet. During the pandemic there was an intense disruption to the learning processes and schools have had to reinvent the education systems to keep students engaged and motivated. Students and teachers have adapted, created, and evolved new ways of learning to build a robust model that is sustainable and withstand any future disruptions. During the pandemic, we have developed a process for inculcating innovative thinking in high schools through a program we call “CV Raman Young Researchers Program (CVR-YRP)”. The goal of this initiative was to create a holistic program in high schools designed to help students ideate, plan, and execute innovative projects. These ideas from this innovative project have been submitted for patent protection. The aim of this program was to provide students with exposure to the process of innovation and to create a culture of collaborative teamwork to develop a well-defined project. In this report, we provide an overview of the processes that were developed for training, mentorship framework and implementation of the innovative processes towards idea generation and execution. We have listed the potential challenges in this program, solutions to which were addressed in the second version, CVR-YPR2. The program has the potential to create a sustainable innovative culture coupled with scientific enquiry in high schools and prepare the students for higher education and bring impactful solutions to address societal needs.

Research and innovation are pillars of the economy. While industries and universities actively contribute to research and innovation, high school education remains traditional and focuses on memory-based learning. Inducting high school students into critical and analytical thinking, systematic investigation process, and safeguarding innovations is critically important for making them ready for successful careers in research and innovation. We have formulated a holistic program called C V Raman Young Research Program (CVR-YRP) to help high school students ideate, plan, and execute innovative projects. We delivered this program in online mode from 2020 to 2021 to students and teachers from two schools located in north and central India. During the program, the students were inducted into literature search and patent filing process. They also learned how to deal with rejection. The students submitted innovative proposals, and a selection committee comprising industry experts and professors evaluated the proposals based on novelty, usability, and scalability. Some of the shortlisted innovations were eventually protected with intellectual property rights. While conducting this program, we encountered administrative, logistic, and emotional challenges. We have formulated a path forward to mitigate these challenges and make learning more productive. We believe that CVR-YRP was successful in inducting high school students into research and innovation.