Jain initially began working directly with students through More Than Play, tutoring 150 children in science and mathematics.
For Aarav A. Jain, STEM education is not simply about learning how technology works. It is about giving students the opportunity to experiment with it, build with it and eventually use it to solve problems around them.
A Class 12 student at Step-by-Step School, Noida, Jain’s own exposure to robotics competitions, engineering workshops, summer programmes and mentors gave him an early opportunity to explore science beyond textbooks.
But while volunteering with More Than Play, an NGO working with children from underserved communities in South Delhi, he encountered a very different learning environment.
Many of the students were curious about science and mathematics but had limited opportunities to experience concepts through experiments, technology or hands-on projects. For Jain, the contrast raised a broader question: How can STEM education move beyond access to classrooms and become access to the experience of creating with technology?
Building a community-led STEM model
Jain initially began working directly with students through More Than Play, tutoring 150 children in science and mathematics.
Rather than relying primarily on memorisation, he introduced interactive activities and experiments designed to help students understand how scientific concepts work in practice.
But the experience also highlighted a challenge around scale.
“If STEM learning was going to continue in these communities, the communities themselves needed people who could teach,” Jain says.
He therefore trained 16 community mentors from underserved communities as STEM facilitators. The mentors received lesson plans, experiment kits and teaching strategies that enabled them to conduct STEM sessions independently.
The approach was designed to create a local learning ecosystem rather than one that depended on a single instructor.
The mentors subsequently worked with Jain to organise a science exhibition involving 250 students, where participants built experiments and demonstrated scientific concepts to their peers.
When sports became a gateway to physics
Jain’s next innovation came from something students already understood: sport.
Football, cricket, running and other sports became practical entry points for explaining scientific principles.
The movement of a football could demonstrate motion. The force behind a cricket throw could explain mechanics. A jump could illustrate concepts in physics that might otherwise seem abstract.
This led to Science That Wins Matches, an initiative that uses sports and everyday experiences to make STEM concepts more accessible.
Jain partnered with three national NGOs and five rural schools, developing an interactive STEM curriculum that used sports as an entry point into physics and related concepts.
He later authored a sports-physics book to take the idea beyond workshops. According to the initiative, 500 copies of the book have reached more than 10,000 students through schools and partner organisations.
The underlying approach is simple: when students can connect a scientific concept to something they already experience, technology and science become less abstract and more intuitive.
From robotics to rural farms
Jain’s interest in engineering eventually took his work from STEM education into a real-world technology application. Building on an autonomous irrigation prototype he began developing during the 2024 YTS Plaksha programme, he created an agritech robotics workshop with the Indigo Knowledge Prism Foundation.
Over two weeks, he worked with 15 students, including children of farmers, to develop soil-sensing irrigation systems that could be adapted for use on their own farms.
The project brought together several elements of modern technology education—robotics, sensors, automation and engineering—with an everyday problem: water management in agriculture.
The students subsequently deployed smart irrigation systems across 15 family-owned farms. Early observations indicated an approximately 20% reduction in water consumption compared with conventional irrigation.
For Jain, the project demonstrated that STEM education can have a purpose beyond academic learning.
Students were not merely learning about sensors or automation. They were applying those technologies to a problem in their own communities.
From technology users to technology creators
Jain’s work has now expanded across three states through schools, NGOs and community partners. His initiatives include directly tutoring 150 students in science and mathematics, training 16 community mentors as STEM facilitators and engaging 250 students through a science exhibition.
But Jain says the number that matters most to him is 16. The mentors he trained are now equipped to conduct STEM sessions independently, allowing the model to continue without requiring his physical presence.
“It is not about how many workshops you personally teach,” he says. “It is about how many people you empower to keep teaching long after you are gone.”
That philosophy sits at the centre of his approach to technology education.
The technology divide, in his view, is not only about access to devices, laboratories or software. It is also about access to opportunities to experiment, build, fail, solve problems and create.
From using sports to explain physics to deploying soil-sensing irrigation systems on farms, Jain’s projects follow the same principle: STEM education becomes more powerful when students move from being consumers of technology to creators of solutions.
For Jain, the objective is therefore not simply to teach more students about science.
It is to create an environment where more students can use science and technology to understand—and eventually solve—the problems around them.