The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Students shine

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Tuesday, Jun 23, 2009
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Students shine

Staff Reporter

Chennai: The first ever class 12 batch of the Government Higher Secondary School at Thoraipakkam saw all students passing in computer science and English during the recent Board Exams – thanks to the initiative of volunteers from Cognizant, the IT and BPO major.

“Last year, the school was upgraded from high school to higher secondary school,” said the headmaster of the school. The government provided teachers for five subjects – English, Maths, Physics, Chemistry and Biology. As the school started the computer science group, they were scouting for good teachers, he said.

In March 2008, Cognizant partnered with the school as part of Outreach, a corporate social responsibility initiative launched in 2007. Focusing on students in class 12, the volunteers from Cognizant took up a subject they worked with every day – computer science.

A computer lab was setup in the school, and for the first few months the volunteers assumed the role of teachers, as the school did not have a teacher for computer science. Though the volunteers were not qualified teachers, they handled the subject well, said the headmaster.

The volunteers conducted three-hour classes twice a week in computer science and spoken English for almost a year.

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Tamil Nadu