More than the education at schools, teenagers are receptive to information presented to them to on bright screens of devices and constructing a website to help these young teenagers with their exams seems to be the ideal way to take.
SLC Stuff (slcquestions.webs.com), an online data bank for School Leaving Certificate (SLC) exam takers, boasts an assortment of sample question papers from highly reputed schools like, St Xavier’s School, Graded English Medium School (GEMS), Triyog Higher Secondary School, and Rosebud School. To aid the process of online learning, the website also contains sample answer sheets of high scoring students and an online game of relevant subject questions. The website seems to be gaining popularity amongst test-takers with an astounding membership count of more that 3000 online students in the three months since the website launched.
“I initially got the idea from my students. I saw some class 10 students visiting websites on the Internet and I advised them to not waste their time but instead to visit useful sites that would help them with their upcoming SLC exams. But when they asked me to name a few, I could not reply because there weren’t any,” says Rajesh Tiwari, a software-engineer and a computer teacher at Rosebud and Whitefield Schools. Tiwari is the brains behind the website that he has individually designed and manages.
“We are very happy that this website has come into existence” says Rosebud Academic Coordinator Damodar Dhungana. “I’ve always seen my student’s struggling to find good practice material but now that SLC Stuff provides question papers from several good schools inside the Valley and several good teachers as well, students need not wander aimlessly. They have all the practice material they need on the website and I have been encouraging my students from Rosebud to practice from SLC Stuff,” he adds.
Tiwari tells us how he wants education to be decentralized, “Goods schools have their own questions and their own style of teaching and I wanted to help students from different schools, from different educational backgrounds to be able to tap into this one universal source of information,” he says. Membership to the website is free and open to all students. The website has a lot of member from private schools and not as many from government schools, but Tiwari says this may be the case because of the English-medium questions on the website but he assures that he is planning on implementing some Nepali-medium questions as well.
“Although I haven’t had the time to visit the website, I’m sure I would benefit greatly from it,” says sixteen year old Sujjita Sharma from Pinnacle High School. “I’ve have to go out to stores and spend money on model questions which gets quite expensive as I have to buy one book for each subject, but a website like this could be an answer to all my troubles,” she adds.
SLC Stuff may be gaining popularity but Tiwari is not satisfied. He has a vision to make the website a universal bank of SLC questions for all students to use, but he faces various obstructions. The website is very difficult to maintain alone, he tells us, and using a free online hosting service restricts his web-storage space to a mere 40 MB. “I want to make the website more resourceful but there are many variables that restrict me. If the website were to be sponsored by someone, I am sure I could make it more resourceful,” he laments.
Tiwari plans to take the website further, with larger web space and varied questions from schools all around Kathmandu. SLC Stuff has a bank of more than 5000 questions from different schools, but Tiwari wants to expand. “I created this website solely for the students and I do not plan to make any money out of it. I just want the students to benefit as much as they can from this website,” he says. The website also has a notes section where students can interact with each other regarding the answers to questions. Students can now ask fellow peers for an explanation to answers for better understanding in comparison to answers provided at the back of the book.
“I am taking three tuition classes to help me prepare for my SLC and my tuition tutors help me by bringing over practice questions from different schools for me to work on, but a website such as SLC Stuff would help me so much in my preparation, says fifteen year old Ninad KC from Shuvatara High School. KC informs that the huge collection of questions and some model answer sheets makes learning as easy as a click of his mouse.
Interactive ways of leaning have started taking the world by storm. Students are no longer receptive to information slapped onto their faces, an age of discovering and finding information is dawning and with SLC Stuff, students are exposed to a different way of studying. They can now research the questions on the internet or ask their peers. Technology has opened doors to so many things around us, and now education in Nepal is no exception either.
Related story
Sara Loren takes to Nepali language in Ishq Click
-1780813474.webp)
-1780749216.webp)
