School Students, Get Ready to Practice More Sanskrit, Now with a Technological Twist!

Central Board of Secondary Education has asked all its affiliated schools to celebrate “Sanskrit week” on an experimental basis to popularise and stimulate interest in it and develop apps on the language.

The Sanskrit week will be organised from 7^th to 13^th August 2014, during which students would be encouraged to participate in short speech competitions in Sanskrit. They are also supposed to compose short poems and developing apps and games for Sanskrit learning, as per a CBSE (Central Board of Secondary Education) letter sent to all school heads.

Schools may also organise recitation competition for classes 9^th to 12^th and essay competition on Sanskrit for classes 9^th to 12^th, it said.

Sadhana Parashar, CBSE director of Academics, Training, Research, and Innovation said that the week is being organised every year but the emphasis this year is on use of technology to develop apps for promotion of the Sanskrit language.

The objective of this whole programme is to promote use of technology in learning and creative skills of students to develop apps or games based on enhancing vocabulary, learning short phrases and numbers in Sanskrit, Parashar said.

The letter said the celebration would provide a medium for ‘popularising Sanskrit’ and ‘stimulating interest’ in it by increasing awareness about the close-relationship between Sanskrit and other languages and cultural heritage of India.

“Sanskrit Week in schools may encourage linguistic creativity among students and provide an opportunity to benefit from the systematic structure of Sanskrit language that may be transferred in giving insights into the learning of the language,” the letter said.

CBSE has also encouraged the teachers to involve themselves in the activity by to carrying out research activities on establishing links of other Indian languages with Sanskrit.

They have been asked to send details of their research with the findings to CBSE for a national level event. Here the best entries in each category will be suitably rewarded and certificates may be awarded to students or teams at the national event, said the letter.