IMPACT IN ACTION
The Students Had the Ambition. They Needed the Roadmap.
Career Readiness & STEM Learning Programme completes at Government Kannada High School, Pendar Galli, Hubballi
Class 10 students reached
gain in coding understanding
correctly defined AI and STEM
Ninety-nine Class 10 students at Government Kannada High School, Pendar Galli, sat down in June to answer a few questions before the programme began. Their answers were the reason the programme exists.
Fourteen of them said that when they have an important decision to make, nobody guides them. Not a parent, not a teacher, not a relative. Nobody.
Only 26 knew where to go to get career guidance at all. Seven knew what coding was. Ten knew what robotics meant. And when asked what they thought stood between them and their dream, the largest single group — 38 students — said they did not know.
That answer is worth sitting with. The biggest obstacle these students could identify was not money and not family circumstance. It was that they could not see the obstacle. Which is another way of saying they had no information.
They were never short of ambition
What they did have was aspiration, in abundance. Across 99 students, more than forty distinct future occupations were named — engineer, doctor, soldier, teacher, software engineer, railway employee, nurse, lawyer, air hostess. Sixty-four described themselves as very confident about choosing a career.
The gap was never belief. The gap was the route.
Fifteen hours later
| What students understood | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Career options available after Class 10 | 14.1% | 85.9% |
| The difference between PUC, Diploma and ITI | 15.2% | 93.8% |
| The education required for a chosen career | 20.2% | 93.8% |
| Basic coding concepts | 7.1% | 89.1% |
| Robotics in everyday life | 10.1% | 92.2% |
| What Artificial Intelligence is | 46.5% | 90.6% |
These are the largest gains recorded anywhere in this programme. Sixty-three students completed both the before and after assessments, and when the analysis is narrowed to only those same students, every single gain holds — and most get larger.
And it was not just self-reported
The endline assessment included two questions with a single right answer. Not "do you feel you understand AI" but "what does AI stand for". Sixty-three of 64 students got both AI and STEM correct.
One student left them blank. Every other student in the room answered both correctly.
What they want to be now
Asked to name a future career they had learned about during the programme, Drone Pilot came up more often than any other emerging role. Students also named AI Trainer, Robotics Technician, Drone Technician, Cyber Security, ESG Professional and Content Creator.
ESG Professional. Named by a Class 10 student in a Government Kannada-medium school in Hubballi, unprompted.
More telling still were the answers about what comes next. Asked for the first step they would take towards their dream, students named completing SSLC with good marks, choosing the right PUC stream, taking up Diploma or ITI, pursuing Science. Concrete. Near-term. Actionable.
Where they finished
| At the close of the programme | Students agreeing |
|---|---|
| I feel confident making decisions about my future | 92.2% |
| I know my strengths and interests better | 92.2% |
| I believe I can achieve my career goals | 90.6% |
| I know what skills I should develop in the future | 90.6% |
| I can solve problems better than before | 90.6% |
Students rated the programme 4.73 out of 5 overall, with 93.7% giving it four or five stars.
Pendar Galli was the second and final school in this programme, bringing the total to 166 students across two Government schools in Hubballi — ahead of the original target of 150.
The curriculum, the Career Discovery Kit, the facilitator model and the assessment framework are now built, tested and proven across two very different student groups. ACS Foundation is ready to take them to more Government schools across North Karnataka.
