Company Name: Sparkling Mindz Global School
Founder Name: Sreeja Iyer
Category and Sub-Category: Educational
City: Bangalore
Year of Founding: 2015
Can you provide us with a description about your Brand / Company:
Sparkling Mindz is based on a vision to create confident learners and changemakers today through innovative learning experiences and making education relevant in the 21st century.
Sparkling Mindz Global School follows a whole-stack, balanced philosophy of learning with children to make learning more purposeful, joyous and relevant in the 21st century for every child.
Children find purpose, make connections and learn critical learning and thinking skills through innovative learning games across several learning areas that have been exclusively designed to create a space for each child to learn and grow at their pace. These are immersive learning experiences that empower children to use the knowledge and skills they acquire to go on a learning journey across lands to solve problems, design solutions, express themselves, communicate with each other, develop a scientific temper, take perspectives and become changemakers.
USP / Competitive Advantage:
At Sparkling Mindz, learn through purpose-driven, meaningful experiences connected to the contexts of their day to day lives.
For example, Languages are learned as Language Arts and Communication (ELAC as English, HLAC as Hindi, KLAC as Kannada etc.), Math as Math Problem Solving and Design (MPD) etc.
Each of these learning area games is further combined under changemaker missions and offered as connected learning experiences and outputs connected to real-life. In this model children get empowered to become aware of their values, beliefs, identities, emotions, skills as well as knowledge. These components are worked on throughout the serious learning games as well as through the their changemaker missions.
Your accomplishments, milestones achieved so far:
We at Sparkling Mindz are proud of the way we are impacting our community of children and parents. We value and celebrate the process and the outcomes equally. Various forms of documentation and different publications have captured our journey at different points in time. Sharing a few of those with you for your consideration.
One of the pillars of our organization is 'Children as change-makers' and when we see our children confidently raising the bar on what student achievements can look like we feel very proud. The below list may look very unconventional but it represents the spirit of our children's wide, deep and connected approach to life and their change maker thinking.
a. TED-Ed Weekend Speaker - One of our afterschool program students, Esha Karthi Raj, 13 years, was selected to speak at the TED-Ed Weekend Live stage in NYC! She was among the 20 students selected from around the world amongst 1000s of TED-Ed talks and one of 2 from India, for the first time in the history of TED-Ed. Here's her talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiWlBEj9uvw)
b. The Better India (a positive news portal with over 30 Million viewers) featured our children on children's day and asked them a few questions that they answered with confidence as a tribute to children all over the world. (https://www.facebook.com/thebetterindia/videos/10155894505704594/)
c. Marathon Runners - We challenge our children both mentally and physically. Our 6-14 year olds embarked on a mission of running a cross-country of 6.6Kms in 2018 and challenged themselves to run a 12K in 2019 as part of Gandhi Jayanti. This was their tribute to the father of our nation and their changemaker mission of raising awareness for children's mental and physical health. A short video depicting their run in 2019 is here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGYMTYcYIk8)
d. As our children were practicing for the cross-country run outdoors they faced rude and unruly behaviour from strangers and they converted their problem into a project. It led to them participating in a Change Maker Project by an NGO called Janagrahaa and using a design thinking approach they created ideas for games to educate children about a few of the issues affecting urban children like Cyberbullying,
e. Case Study of transformative learning from our afterschool program on how a child who developed Emotional Intelligence transferred her learning to the home environment (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkKKUQf2oCc)
f. Case Study of an ideation process that shows children to convert problems into opportunities for innovation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4c48y6TKok)
g. We have been able to work towards inspiring Current and Future Educators to think differently about learning through thought leadership. You can listen to our CEO talk about unconventional career choices here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9V-Zp5eXU0)
Target Customers:
Parents with children in school going age
Website: https://www.sparklingmindz.in/