Agastya International Foundation

Campus Creativity Lab Agastya has a "Campus Creativity Lab" located on a 172-acre campus in Kuppam, Andhra Pradesh. It houses science and art centers, including among other labs an astronomy center, a planetarium, a center for creative teaching, an innovation hub, a science model-making center, and the Ramanujan Math Park, an open-air ecology lab. The school has 800 teachers and 280 night school volunteers. The school has cumulatively reached over eight million with around 1.5 million children every year apart from 2.5 million teachers. The foundation conducted a science fair in Bihar in 2012 which reached out to 24,000 students and 1,100 teachers through a bequest of the Late Mr. Abdul Kalam (Ex-President of India) to sponsor a program in Bihar. One of the organization's central aims is to develop student curiosity in the world around them and to launch them on a path of lifetime discovery and understanding. ==Activities==

As a result of the COVID-19 outbreak (2020) Agastya has provided online training for public school teachers in over 15 states, and has helped students set up science labs at home. ==Awards and recognitions==

Agastya won the Google Global Impact Award in 2013 and was ranked among the top 100 global innovators by The Rockefeller Foundation Next Century Awards. In 2016, Agastya's founder Ramji Raghavan received the Deshpande Foundation's Sandbox Catalyst Award from Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus and the Innovation for India Award from the Marico Innovation Foundation. In 2019 Agastya received an Andhra Pradesh State Green Award for its work to regenerate the ecosystem of its 172-acre campus, which is documented in the book, 'The Roots of Creativity'. In 2020, Agastya was featured in the book, 'Seven Sutras of Innovation' by Nikhil Inamdar, as one of eight organizations in India that as "start-ups to scale-ups are transforming India". As the organization's efforts have gained recognition around the world, it has been approached by well-known educational organizations for experiments in educational innovation. The project-based learning program, for example, was started by Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts with Agastya. ==References==