Waheed, Kiyani, and Bhatti stand before their robot at the 2017 FIRST Global challenge | Photo by Ritu Prasad, Medill News Service
While Bhatti and students like him may dream of creating new science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) based companies, Pakistan is not the friendliest to innovation. According to the Global Innovation Index, Pakistan ranks 131 out of 141 countries.
Pakistan, India and Bangladesh – as South Asia’s most populated countries – face serious issues of “insufficient educational enrolment rates and poor quality primary schools,” according to the World Economic Forum’s 2016 Human Capital report. In Pakistan, the youth literacy rate is just 75 percent, which places the country “far behind other emerging markets as well as their own lower-middle income group’s average.”
According to UNESCO data, Pakistan’s expenditure on research and development has also dropped substantially over the last 10 years. In 2015 Pakistan only spent one-quarter of one percent of its GDP on research and development in the science, technology and innovation sector. This is mirrored by a decrease in funding from the government — in 2011 the Pakistani government funded close to 84 percent of R&D, dropping to around 67 percent in 2015.
And when it comes to math and science education across Pakistan students are lagging behind, according to a report by the Pakistan Alliance for Math and Science. The study found that average scores for math and science on the National Education Assessment System all fell below 50 percent. The report attributes this low performance in math and science to factors such as historically bad teachers as well as “low quality content” for teaching those subject areas. “In addition to the quality of content, how material is taught is also a significant challenge. Pedagogical improvement is another area that needs attention,” states the report.
Keeping children interested in STEM subjects can be a difficult task. Traditional attitudes around math and science that push memorising to achieve higher marks rather than fostering inquiry and comprehension have made these fields, understandably, unappealing to many youth.
For Bhatti, robotics makes science more engaging. “In STEM and in robotics, you learn while having fun,” he says. “In class, sometimes you doze off because it is not interesting but in this it is fun as well as educational.”
For now, Bhatti and his five teammates are the only robotics group in his school to participate in international competitions. Bhatti is confident that what he has learned from cooperation and competition on a global stage will help him achieve his career aspirations. The government, he adds, should pay more attention to the country’s youth.
“We, the children, are the ones who are going to grow up and become the leaders in the future,” Bhatti says. “So why not invest in the future of the country?”
While five of the team members were purely dedicated to manning the robot, Maryam Ahmad Kiyani, 17, played an important role as their spokesperson, interacting with the other teams, writing articles and posting on social media. Kiyani brought a basket of bangles as a token of friendship to pass out to other countries — a gesture so popular the team ran out within hours.
“It’s a lot more than just robot building, it’s teamwork, it’s cooperation, it’s interacting with the world, it’s great,” she says. While she plans to study political science when she heads to Lahore University of Management Sciences in the fall, Kiyani says that technology will “make the world a better place.”