Pramaan
Design for a hotter planet
Work out how heat moves, then design and test a way to keep a room cooler without power.
Curiosity
Curiosity: the habit of finding problems worth solving.
Every invention starts with someone who noticed a question nobody else was asking. At Pramaan, children practise that noticing on purpose, every session, on problems big enough to matter.
- A hidden rule or number to chase in every lab
- Questions before answers, always
- Real problems at the scale of India and the world
Why curiosity, and why now
A young child asks about 26 questions an hour at home and about 2 at school. That finding comes from psychologists Barbara Tizard and Martin Hughes, and developmental psychologist Susan Engel of Williams College has shown how schooling quietly trains the asking out of children.
It can be trained back in. Economists Sule Alan and Ipek Mumcu ran the largest classroom trial of curiosity ever, with 11,000 pupils, and found that children taught to wonder still remembered more science three years later (American Economic Review, 2024).
In a world where any answer is one search away, the scarce skill is the question. The children who can find a problem worth solving are the ones who will build what comes next.
How a lab grows curiosity
1
A rule to crack
Every lab opens with a game that has a hidden rule. Children have to ask their way to it before anyone explains anything.
2
Guess, then test
They commit to a guess, say how sure they are, then design questions and experiments to check it.
3
Questions that change the plan
We notice the question that sends a project in a new direction, and make room for it.
4
Still curious about
Every week ends with what they still want to know. The best of those become next week's problems.
Projects that grow it
Every project is interdisciplinary: one real problem, several subjects, one thing built at the end.
Feed a city of a crore
Plan a meal that is healthy, affordable and could be cooked ten million times a day.
Argue the future
Should AI grade exams? Teams gather evidence, argue both sides, then defend one position in front of the room.
What you will notice at home
More questions at dinner, and better ones. Every Sunday note ends with the thing your child is still curious about, so you can pick up the thread at home.
We track curiosity with the Curiosity and Exploration Inventory-II at the start, middle and end of every cohort.