In the bustling heart of the Community Service 2023 organized by Fountainhead School, there were various clusters including: art and craft, dance, ICT, football, frisbee, and science. The goal of this initiative was to nurture extra curricular activities in underprivileged students from the local governmental schools in our community. This initiative strives to develop compassion in young individuals with an international perspective for a better tomorrow, by nurturing our social obligations. Amongst all of these various activities, I decided to volunteer for ICT due to my inclination towards computer science. In the modern time of Computer Technology, it is essential that every student has basic information about ICTs and IoT devices. Therefore, I decided to be a part of the community service so that I can teach the students from the local schools about ICT as this teaching field isn’t present in most local schools in our community.
The community service program lasted for the whole month of August. During this duration, every weekend we volunteered for 4 hours, adding up to a total of 16 hours of service. The major reason for me taking a part in the community service program was helping the underprivileged children by enhancing their extra curricular activities, in my case, ICT. I took this program as an opportunity to contribute towards the 4th UN SDG – Quality Education as extra curriculars are a major aspect of one’s intellectual growth. Though, I had a fear that the students would miss out on their learning due to a potential communication gap, it didn’t hinder the service as all of the students were able to understand Hindi. Throughout the program, my friends and I educated the underprivileged students about the following: Google Surfing & Dorks Implementation, Google Docs & Sheet, and Google Maps and YouTube Exploration.
This community service helped me accomplish the following learning outcomes:
Learning Outcome 1 — Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth
Despite the various activities in the community service initiative, I volunteered for the ICT cluster due to my inclination towards the same. Ever since Grade 6, I’ve been very inclined towards computers and how they work which led me to spend my leisure time into developing my computer science skills. Considering this cluster as my community service was the perfect choice because I am well-versed with computers and would able to educate the students in a more efficient way as compared to any other cluster. Lastly, the thing that I never expected, the underprivileged students taught me one of the most important experiences in life, “Education in itself is a privilege, be grateful if you are receiving Quality Educationâ€. The students treated us (all volunteers) with utmost respect as if we were their literal teachers, which was a major driving force for my motivation to share my knowledge with them.
Learning Outcome 2 — Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process
Initially, carrying this out as my CAS experience was challenging for me due to early morning volunteering hours on weekends. However, after my first day with the students I became motivated to teach them which helped me eradicate my problem of sleeping late on weekends. Furthermore, my patience is very low which causes me to easily get irritated if someone doesn’t understand what I’m trying to tell them. As an irony, I needed to reiterate the same point at least 3-4 times for the students to understand. Therefore, I had indirectly undertaken the challenge of impatience, and I wouldn’t say completely, but to some extent I became more patient.
Learning Outcome 4 — Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experiences
Just like any other task, teaching underprivileged students for 4 hours/week required commitment. I’m very persistent about computers and their usage, which makes me annoyed if someone uses it an ineffective way. However, as the underprivileged students were new to computers and ICT, commitment was required so that I can maintain my patience and teach them ICT skills by my maximum capabilities. In addition to this, as our IB Diploma Program had just commenced, the weekends were very crucial due to the assignments, however, I understood that time needs to be committed to the community service as well. Therefore, I committed myself and my free time to the community service sessions by showing perseverance.
Learning Outcome 6 — Demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance
The 4th UN SDG, Quality Education, is a major global issue, which, if solved, would help in eradicating many of the 17 different UN SDGs. By nurturing the extra curricular activities of students, their quality of education will definitely improve as “quality education†doesn’t only mean literacy and numeracy skills, but also takes into consideration real-life skills that consists of computer literacy. Therefore, by nurturing the computer literacy skills of the underprivileged students, this service can be demonstrated as an engagement with issues of global significance, especially Quality Education, the 4th UN SDG. I feel that my contribution would definitely benefit the global community, as it’s rightly said, “Small actions can make a big difference.â€
During this community service program, I developed various learner profile characteristics including:
- Caring
- Communication
- Knowledgeable
- Open-minded
I was caring when I spent my free time to educate the underprivileged children. I was open-minded enough to not judge them for who they are, but to connect with them as a human being. By using my computer skills, I was knowledgeable to share it with them by effectively applying my communication skills to increase the effectiveness of the knowledge sharing.