COIMBATORE — Rithanya Sivaram, a Class 12 student at The Indian Public School, has launched Vibrance Hub, a platform designed to foster project-based learning, peer collaboration, and holistic wellbeing. This initiative aims to address a critical gap as India prepares its youth for an AI-dominated future, where creativity and sustained innovation hold far more value 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. “While Atal Tinkering Labs provide students with tools and space to innovate at a national scale, Vibrance Hub offers the necessary scaffolding, community, and wellbeing practices to transform interests into sustained creative outputs.
Built on **MIT’s Lifelong Kindergarten framework**—Passion, Projects, Peers, and Play—Vibrance Hub redefines maker education. It emphasizes that such education encompasses not only building tangible items but also nurturing critical skills like computational thinking, resilience through iterative processes, and collaborative abilities—traits that AI cannot replicate.
As children navigate problems with fearless experimentation, standardized testing and the pressure for ‘correct’ answers gradually erode their confidence. Over time, students may become self-critical, hesitant to venture into new territories unless success seems guaranteed. The very creativity that arises naturally in childhood can become buried beneath excessive practicality and a pursuit of perfection, leading to the false belief that one is inherently “not creative.”
Vibrance Hub, in many respects, represents a revival of India’s educational roots. Long before Macaulay’s notorious Minute on Education in February 1835 enforced a system favoring rote learning and clerical readiness for the colonial regime, India’s gurukul tradition celebrated experiential learning. Students learned through active creation and problem-solving, whether by forging metals, observing celestial patterns, or practicing medicine.
The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 explicitly encourages a renaissance of this maker-centric approach, asserting that India’s future economic and cultural prosperity hinges on nurturing creators and innovators rather than mere repeaters of information.
The Atal Innovation Mission (AIM), launched in 2016 by NITI Aayog, reflects India’s most ambitious effort to operationalize this maker-centric philosophy on a large scale. AIM aligns with the NEP 2020’s vision by developing tangible infrastructure that enables hands-on learning throughout the nation.
