Knowledge
Municipal schools turn to soccer for teaching Mathematics and Financial Literacy
The 15-year-old ‘Slum Soccer’ initiative has spawned a new way of making learning fun for underprivileged children across the country. Their latest initiative Edu-Kick integrates elementary education with football to make learning mathematics fun.
Edu-Kick is a new initiative by the founders of ‘Slum Soccer’ to help students from municipal schools learn mathematics through soccer.
It all started in the year 2001,when Vijay Barse, a retired sports teacher, children playing jugaad football with a small bucket, splashing muddy rainwater all around the tiny playground of a shanty town. It was a Eureka moment. Vijay realised that the simple act of playing soccer – could become a tool of emancipation.
Jhoparpatti football, as he called it then, roped in youngsters from all kinds of difficult backgrounds – drug abuse, anti-social activities, personal struggles, etc. They all started to get together for some games of soccer and slowly but surely, their lives started changing. And thus, Slum Soccer was born.
15 years after its inception, Slum Soccer is now venturing into an oddly familiar territory. Abhijeet Barse (son of Vijay Barse) who now heads the Slum Soccer team and its operations came across another social challenge and, just like his father decided to deal with it with the help of soccer.
Reading through the newspaper one morning, Abhijeet came across a piece of news that said children in most municipal schools were struggling to learn. A recent study also showed that only 25.3% of Class 3 students can perform simple subtraction and 55.9% of Class 8 students are unable to do simple division. This information left Barse restless. He wanted to do something about it but all he knew was how to play soccer. So he decided to help these kids learn through soccer and started a new initiative called Edu-kick.
Edu-kick is aimed at improving and building upon existing educational outcomes, using football as a tool. He and his team designed games based on football to teach elementary mathematics (number system, squares and cubes, angles) and basic communication, to help the children become financially literate as well.
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