Bringing MIT Scratch platform to India's children

MIT Media Lab has developed Scratch, an educational tool for children to learn coding through visual programming. It is now used in many parts of the World as a stepping stone to computer programming. It allows children to explore, experience, and share their ideas without technical coding's high cognitive demands. After all, coding has become a staple in the STEM and modern creative fields of the present industrial revolution. Enabling a generation of youngsters who can develop that experience and opportunity is undoubtedly valuable for the nation.

My first brush with Scratch was when I made Scratch available offline under a nonprofit initiative called Education without Border that includes building low-cost electronic libraries in rural or poorer schools or for those digital have-nots with poor/no access to Internet. Later I had introduced the tool to high school seniors during a camp sponsored by my previous university in Odisha. However, it was all in English and geared to the older children (High School+).

So I was excited when I heard that Pratham organization is initiating a massive effort to bring Scratch to millions of young children of India, a country where more than 75+% of the population don't speak English. When very young children are given a learning environment in their native language, they won't feel burdened and learn complex concepts faster and effortlessly.

I learned in July of 2020 that Pratham is looking for volunteers to translate the hefty Scratch platform to various Indian languages and bring it to India's children. They needed an expert who is a native speaker in Oriya (Odia). I jumped at that opportunity and agreed to take on the translation tasks sent by Pratham. I was familiar with Pratham through my earlier volunteering for them in Oregon, USA, and my later service on the Board of Pratham Chapter in Austin, Texas. I chose to be a translator for Odia language and translated many of the Scratch project resources from English to Oriya. Later in 2020, I was also nominated as the editor of the translation initiative for Oriya language and reviewed all translations submitted by other volunteers. I am happy that I could find time and luck to work on such a worthwhile project. Besides the social value of the project and the potential benefits to India's youngsters, I was doubly excited to combine machine-translation with human translation in order to accelerate the effort. As an instance, the head image of this article shows two juxtaposed screenshots of the "About" sub-page of Scratch website in English and Oriya.

After eight months of volunteered effort during my free time, I am delighted to say that today a large portion of the creative visual programming platform has been translated to Odia. As we could finish this, the global Scratch team decided to release the Odia language platform ahead of the others such as Hindi. Yet, it's work in progress. You can enjoy it by going to scratch.mit.edu and choosing "Oriya" at the bottom (unfortunately:-) of the page from the language menu.

I thank my partners at Pratham and SEEDS, two great nonprofit organizations, and the friends and students who helped the project move along -- for such a wonderful cause.