COIMBATORE — Rithanya Sivaram, a Class 12 student at The Indian Public
School, has launched Vibrance Hub, a platform that brings together project-based learning, peer collaboration, and wellbeing support—addressing a critical gap as India prepares students for an AI-dominated future where creativity and sustained innovation matter more than rote knowledge.
“In the age of AI, information is commoditized. What matters now is what you can
make, how you think, and whether you can sustain creative work over time,” says Sivaram. “Atal Tinkering labs has given students the tools and space to tinker at a national scale. Vibrance Hub gives them the scaffolding, community, and wellbeingpractices to turn interest into sustained making.”
Built on MIT’s Lifelong Kindergarten framework—Passion, Projects, Peers, and
Play—Vibrance Hub recognizes that maker education isn’t just about building things. It’s about developing computational thinking, resilience through iteration, and the ability to collaborate—skills no AI can replicate.
Children approach problems with fearless experimentation, but years of standardized testing and “correct answer” thinking gradually erode that confidence. We become cautious, self-critical, afraid to try something new without guaranteed success. The very creativity that once came naturally gets buried under layers of practicality and perfectionism—until we convince ourselves we’re simply “not creative people” anymore.
In many ways, Vibrance Hub represents a return to India’s educational roots. Before Macaulay’s infamous Minute on Education in February 1835 imposed a rote-learning system designed to create clerks for colonial administration, India’s gurukul tradition emphasized learning by doing—not in passive consumption of knowledge, but in active creation and problem-solving —students learned metallurgy by forging, astronomy by observing, medicine by practicing.
The National Education Policy 2020 explicitly calls for reviving this maker-centric
approach, recognizing that India’s future prosperity depends on creators and
innovators, not information repeaters.
The Atal Innovation Mission (AIM), launched in 2016 by NITI Aayog, represents India’s most ambitious attempt to operationalize the maker-centric philosophy at scale. AIM directly addresses the NEP 2020’s call for fostering creativity and innovation by creating tangible infrastructure for hands-on
learning across the country.
