Namya Joshi (14), Class-8 student at Sat Paul Mittal School Namya Joshi (14), a Class-8 student at Sat Paul Mittal School in Ludhiana, has been conferred with the Pradhan Mantri Rashtriya Bal Puraskar on the Republic Day, in Innovation category for using Minecraft, a gaming software for children, to create activity-based learning modules for her school.
Pradhan Mantri Rashtriya Bal Puraskar is the highest civilian award for an individual below the age of 18.
From the epic Ramayana to JK Rowling’s Harry Potter, Egyptian civilisation to life of Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, Namya has created lessons on almost everything on Minecraft.
Namya interacted with Prime Minister Narendra Modi through video conferencing facility from the Ludhiana Deputy Commissioner’s office on Monday. She was accompanied by her father Kunal Joshi and mother Monica Joshi.
The only child of her parents, Namya says that she wants to become an entrepreneur and make learning fun through technology. Namya, who has conducted multiple Skype sessions for both teachers and students to initiate them into the use of Minecraft in classes, had also met Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at the ‘Young Innovators’ Summit’ in Delhi in February last year.
DC Varinder Kumar Sharma honoured Namya and her parents. He said that Ludhiana is proud of their daughters. He said that girls have always excelled in different fields and hoped that Namya would make the country proud by her achievements.
Recollecting the time she explored game based learning for the first time, she says, “I remember the software asking for a username and password. I had won a competition at school that day and my mother was feeling generous and that is how I managed to get her login credentials for Minecraft.”
Her list of achievements include honor by Nadella for creating a course material in Minecraft Education Edition and training more than a hundred teachers to make their lessons interesting with the help of Game Based Learning. She has been a crusader in making learning fun through technology.
Namya was also a keynote speaker at ‘KEOS 2019 – a global education conference’ in Jyvaskyla, Finland. A recipient of E-Innovation Award 2019, she is working on promoting many Global Projects as #SDGsForChildrenAmbassador.
Her motto in life is #EachOneTeachTen. She expounds, “Each one should share the learning with the next 10, and with this chain, we can make this reaction beautiful and impactful.” She wants to work assiduously to create awareness about the need to protect the environment and create a balance between society and nature for long term sustainability and cohabitation. Her dream is to make India a technology giant.