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Mridula Chalamalasetti, who graduated from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in the spring, is encouraging more play in India’s education system through Games for Ed, an organization she co-founded.

Games for Ed is an organization established to help improve the educational outcomes of children in India, according to Chalamalasetti. The group develops a variety of interactive and customizable games, and trains teachers on how to make their lessons more engaging with play.

Chalamalasetti, who grew up in India, was a Teach for India fellow before starting her graduate studies at HGSE. She worked in underfunded schools and said she realized “the classrooms were very one-sided,” leaving students disengaged.

“We worked in marginalized communities, where we saw students struggle to learn, or they were learning in very traditional methods,” Chalamalasetti said. “Not a lot of learning outcomes were happening, and students were also not being engaged.”

The experience inspired her and her co-founders, Abhijith Giridhar and Meha Wadher, to begin experimenting with ways to help students absorb knowledge without expensive technology.

In creating an early set of games, which includes board games and card games, they attempted to match the early education curriculum.

“In Games for Ed, we actually designed games for the classroom depending on the particular learning outcomes that the teacher or that school wants to achieve,” Chalamalasetti said. “If they say they want something around sustainability, we will actually contextualize a board game around sustainability, and then we will go run it in the classroom.”

Chalamalasetti said that there are minimal amounts of technology in the Indian schools that Games for Ed works directly with.

“It is generally like a board game, or a card game, but it is contextualized to a learning outcome,” she said.

Games for Ed was awarded $5,000 in May by the Mittal Institute, who named the project a runner up for its Seed for Change competition. The project was also part of the Harvard Innovation Lab.

According to HGSE’s magazine, Chalamalasetti plans to use the Seed for Change grant money to develop 20 more games and expand into 30 more classrooms. They also hope to train 200 teachers in the southern Indian city of Bengaluru, Chalamalasetti told Ed. Magazine.

Saravanan Shekar, a managing board member at Gokul Public School in the city of Bengaluru, helped implement Games for Ed within the school.

“We’ve seen a drastic change in students’ behaviour and social skills since introducing Games for Ed,” Shekar wrote in a statement to The Crimson.

“The students have become more confident, expressive, and ready to showcase their talents in ways we hadn’t seen before,” he wrote.

Shekar wrote that he supports the project’s expansion to many different schools so students can have access to alternative forms of learning.

“I can only imagine the massive impact if this approach became a core part of teaching and learning,” he added.

—​​Staff writer Bryce C. Freeman can be reached at bryce.freeman@thecrimson.com.

—​​Staff writer Ava Pakravan can be reached at ava.pakravan@thecrimson.com.