On the 21st of January, Monday, we had our second Outreach program at the Ranganathan Residential School for Deaf children, in Vishrantwadi, Pune. Considering the fact that our first outreach program at Gulmohar Days could have been improved a lot, we decided to prepare well for this one, with a definite order of speaking, and a powerpoint presentation to help us maintain the flow of demonstration.
Each and every person was assigned with a specific topic to speak about, and the scripts for their respective subjects were compiled together, so that there wouldn't be any mishaps during the course of the presentation. Feeling confident, we went up to the school, only to realise that we had made a major mistake by missing out on the fact that we were going to a school for the deaf. Therefore, all the matter we had prepared for speaking, wouldn't be that effective, as a translator would be converting everything we said into sign language for them. We realised that the students over there would be more interested in seeing the robot actually work, than listening to us talking about STEM and robotics, and therefore, we made a few last minute changes and only spoke about the important parts in our presentation. At the end of it, we also gave the students a chance to control the robot, so that they would get the feel of what controlling the robot felt like, and hopefully get inspired to experiment around with stuff too.
Although we had to compromise and change a lot of things at the end moment, we managed to cope up quite well, and our discomfort wasn't that visible to the students. They were all quite impressed with the demonstration we put up, and at the end of it, all of them came up to us and shook hands with every single one of us. It was quite an amazing feeling to know we had managed to make a difference in someone's life, and we hope to encourage many more such students in the future as well.
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