Mango Education

2023-12-17

In the summer of 2018, I served as a tutor at Mango Education, an off-school education company for children aged 10-15. I developed and tutored a summer course on statistics, introducing kids to essential statistical methods like data collection, summary statistics and spreadsheet skills.

Education at Mango was activity based learning. For each course objective, a handout outlining an activity that led to achieving the objective was prepared. The children worked on the activities, and the classes revolved around discussing these activities and their connection to the learning objectives. These sessions served as a platform for the children to refine their ideas and knowledge through interactive discussions, comparing their work with others', rethinking concepts, and polishing their understanding. Most activities centered around statistics related to sports or cartoons, as we believed these topics resonated more effectively with the children and engaged them more than other subjects.

To give an example, the first course objective focused on data collection. The handout introduced basic survey methods like forms and telephone interviews, then tasked the children with gathering information using notepads. Next, the activity was discussed in class and the children were taught about the drawbacks of using notepad for information collection, how to organize the information in a spreadsheet. Next, to introduce concepts like mean and median, we piqued their curiosity by posing questions based on the data, then demonstrated how summary statistics could be used to answer such questions. Finally, data visualization techniques to like bar graphs, tally marks were introduced using Microsoft Excel.

I liked the way of imparting education at Mango. Each cohort was small, containing 15-20 kids and there were lot of engagement and discussion during the session.