When asked what an ideal school would look like, a Class IX student from a government school in Odisha took a blank white page, sat with his friend, and drew a picture of whatever they wanted – a playground, a library, a dining hall, a swimming pool, dance class, a park, and a bicycle stand. In one corner, a classroom. In his imagination there was more play and less study. The picture this fourteen year old boy drew was probably a rejection of how he was shown how to learn. A system that confined learning to one room, and hence there was only one way to measure success in exams, jobs and life.
The world into which these students will graduate looks nothing like the world that school has prepared them for. The war in Europe disrupted the global food supply chain overnight. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing the meaning of work faster than any curriculum committee can react. The defining characteristic of the future is that it will be uncertain in ways that we cannot fully predict or respond to. By 2030, only 47% of Indian school graduates are projected to have the basic skills to be employable.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 shows that employers are demanding analytical thinking, creative thinking, flexibility, systems thinking and technical literacy as the fastest growing essential competencies. About 39% of key job skills are expected to change by 2030. Youth need the confidence to ask questions when there are no answers, to identify what is broken around them, to collaborate to overcome differences, and to try to move forward even when the path is unclear.
Here’s an equitable question: Which youth are being prepared for this future and which are not?
Students in well-resourced private schools debate, prototype, fail and try again. Design Thinking Labs, Model UN conferences, Robotics Clubs and Entrepreneurship electives are built into their school years. Their curriculum believes that thinking, questioning and creating are just as important as remembering. For government school students, one promise continues to echo across the education system: Present the correct answers again and everything else will fall into place. It may have worked before, but no longer does.
The change was called for in the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. It named experiential learning, critical thinking and competency-based education as the direction in which Indian school education should move. It recognized that the purpose of the school was to prepare young people who could use knowledge to explore the world. The difference between that approach and what happens in most public school classrooms is huge.
Two national initiatives have attempted to bridge that gap by providing increased opportunities in the government school ecosystem. Atal Tinkering Labs (ATL) brings makerspace and innovation infrastructure to schools. INSPIRE MANAK created a national platform for student innovation. Both have done meaningful work. But ATLs are resource-intensive – equipment, space, dedicated staff – and limited to a relatively small number of schools. The INSPIRE standards, as a plan, create a destination for innovation but do not always provide the structured process that gets students there. A student cannot submit a prototype to INSPIRE MANAK if someone has not taught him to identify a solvable problem in the first place.
This is the gap that ideathons and hackathons, when properly incorporated into government school systems, are designed to fill. We spent nearly two decades working at the intersection of government school education and youth employability in India, reaching over 1.4 million learners in over 10,000 schools and training 40,000 teachers. During this time, we have worked with teachers and students in tribal areas of Odisha and Gujarat, teachers and students in remote coastal villages in Andhra Pradesh, social welfare department residential schools in Karnataka, and Santhali-speaking students in Jharkhand.
Over the past five years, students from these geographical areas studying in government schools have been participating in Ideathon and Hackathon, Hack to the Future, facilitated by teachers trained by Quest Alliance in collaboration with the Department of Education in 5 states. These students are identifying the problems in their lives, tracing those problems to their root causes, and creating solutions.
On the third day of Hack to the Future in Bengaluru last year, a group of learners from a government school in Odisha gathered around a cardboard model of their village. They were debating whether Internet of Things (IoT) sensors should be installed near hand pumps or school gates. Their prototype was a low-cost water quality warning system, designed to address the pollution that sickened families in their village last summer.
Five girl students from a government school in Andhra Pradesh chose to address menstrual health in a way that provided a safe space for girls experiencing menstruation for the first time, a space to clarify doubts and share their concerns without fear of judgment or shame. They conducted user research, identified shortcomings in existing tools, and created a working application that tracks cycles, monitors health indicators, and guides users on their various questions. When their research revealed that the problem extended beyond one gender, they redesigned the platform to be more inclusive.
Concerned about the stagnant water accumulating in her village’s tanks over time, Devyanshiben Rajubhai Patel, an eighth-grader from Gujarat, and her team designed a smart water pump system – an automated filtration process to clean water and tanks and make it suitable for daily use and agriculture.
Another group of eighth grade students built MOO CARE, an IoT-based system to track the health and location of cattle, because one student wanted to solve a problem that his mother faced every morning. He had no prior exposure to IoT. He learned it because the problem demanded it. The project was documented by MIT on its global MIT App Inventor platform.
Hackathons and ideaathons work by reorienting the classroom around a different starting point. Students observe their own lives, name what’s unfair or broken, trace a problem to its root cause, then create and test solutions with others. For many of these students, children of farmers and daily wage labourers, girls from residential schools away from home, first generation learners from tribal districts, this is the first time that a teacher has asked them to treat their own observations as knowledge.
A common belief in education reform is that public school teachers are obstacles to change. The evidence we have from five states suggests otherwise.
A teacher in Odisha described it clearly. Before the training, she didn’t know how to help students think beyond the textbook. Now they come to him with problems that he himself had not thought about. A student identified a problem of water pollution in her village that had not been identified by the local administration.
NEP 2020 also demands the same from Indian classrooms. It requires teachers trained to facilitate inquiry, and a curriculum that focuses on observation and problem-solving, not just memorization. Hackathons and ideathons offer a tested model for this: structured teacher capacity building paired with a classroom process that puts the NEP approach into practice.
With ongoing support including a clear facilitation framework, structured training, and a simple chatbot that helps teachers track progress and ask for help when they get stuck, government school teachers adopt the process and stick with it. These students cannot become entrepreneurs. They can’t take their prototypes to market. They will go back home, back to their classes, back to the rhythm of normal life.
But they’ll go back knowing they can ask a question that matters. That they can see any problem of their village, their home, their community and not wait for someone else to solve it. For young people who have spent their school lives being told what to think and when to say, this is a significant change. It is this sense of agency that a student will adopt in his or her life.
The picture the ninth grade student drew was a school where there was a place for his curiosity and a world worth paying attention to. One million government schools in India are filled with students like him. The model is there, tested and ready. The next step is to definitely make it available to every government school student.
The question for policy makers, curriculum designers and education departments is simple: if the future we are preparing our learners for is uncertain, interconnected and rapidly changing, what will it take for our curriculum and pedagogy to match that reality? Not for some students in well-resourced schools. All of them for 127 million.
This article is written by Rishi Majumdar and Mohammad Azim ud Daulah, Quest Alliance.
