Attendees: Sanjeev, AnitaK, Gaurav, AnitaI, Bharath, Sais, Santhosh, Pankaj, Murali, Arvind, Ashwini, Lalit, Sree.
Announcements:
1) As we take up a lot more projects we need to put together what we have learnt as responsibilities of stewards, common questions we ask of projects through a project proposal format and guidelines on site visits.
http://www.ashanet.org/austin/projects/

2) We had a conference call with Prajnalaya and asked the questions we had. Going forward we would have a teleconference to decide if we want to approve the project or not.
Action Items:
a) Modify the project proposal with inputs from the conference call
b) Is there anything additional we want to help with the school?
c) Have a conference call to make a decision on the project

3) Asha Shiksha Sansthan:
Arvind, the new steward of Asha Shiksha Sansthan, presented updates of the project from recent visits by asha volunteers in India and from the recent telecons and went through the improvements and the challenges in the project.
http://www.ashanet.org/projects/project-view.php?p=398

We had some discussion about the support-a-child (SAC) program. The questions have been earlier answered in the SAC FAQ:
http://www.ashanet.org/austin/projects/sac/faq.html

Action Items:
We need to find a way to make recurring deposits work for donors.

4)Vasundhara: Science on Wheels
Sree presented information about Vasundhara a project in Sindhudarg district. The project involves a mobile unit that goes school to school to give hands on experiments for children to make them interested in science learning. It also works with teachers on teachers training. Additionally, there exists a central location where children visit and do experiments.
http://data.ashanet.org/datastore/data/Chapters/Austin/proposals/VasundharaScienceOnWheels/vasundharaPresentation.ppt

Additional documents:
- Proposal
- Pictures
- Budget breakdown

Q: How do they work with the kids?
A: Teach at the van they go to 1/2 day a school. Two visits a year.
5-6 teachers who go to teachers and kids.

Q: What is their outreach in terms of places?
Q: What do they exactly do in half a day – how many kids can they teach?
A: They reach out to 8th and 9th standard children

Q: When did they start, when did the vans come into the picture?
Q: Is there any follow up with the kids who are touched by the project? How do you measure success?
A: They get feedback from the children. There is a similar project in TN called Eureka. The children have an exhibition at the end of the year to showcase what they have learnt.

Q: What else do the teachers do?
A: The teachers are employed full time.

Q: Do they reach out to children who are not in school?

Q: They are reaching out only to children in 8th and 9th. It is not to late, as a lot of children may have dropped out.

Q: Is it only text book based experiments or is it based on a broader curriculum?

Q: Can the curriculum be distributed to schools?

Q: What is the detailed budget for this project?
Q: What is the background of the teachers? Male/female, age-range.
Q: Can we get pictures/videos from the project, a sample schedule, what experiments are performed?

Suggestion: Have a survey both before and after the experiment.
Q: Do they involve the school teachers before the training.
Q: Need to check with Princeton what the status is?
Q: When is the webpage going to be updated?