Indian company Slum Soccer was founded in 2001 to help kids from troubled backgrounds acquire important life skills and a community support system through soccer. Fifteen years later, the head of the company, Abhijeet Barse founded EduKick, an initiative that teaches municipal school children mathematics through cleverly designed soccer games.
In India, children who live in slums get enrolled into largely ineffective municipal schools. The majority of the children enrolled in these schools are involved in child labour, drugs and gang violence, which explains why 55.9 per cent of class eight students are unable to perform a simple division sum.
EduKick is hoping to change this statistic by using soccer as a tool for experiential learning. Two Slum Soccer coaches, Ankit and Sajid designed the games using their backgrounds in engineering. Their objective when designing the games was to teach basic mathematic skills as well as financial literacy.
The games, which are named after the children’s favourite soccer players, incorporate bright visual design elements to teach math skills such as number systems, profit and loss, and tables. The programme has seen positive outcomes after training more than 200 children.
“I always believed that education shouldn’t be the property of a classroom,” says Ankit. “Education is the most powerful weapon to change the world. For promoting literacy the most important thing is to make learning easy by changing the process of teaching.”
