On July 31, at 8.40am IST, ‘granny’ Tali Blumgart logs in to Skype from Melbourne. About 10,209km away, at an all girls’ school in Kalkaji, Delhi, a group assembles in front of a computer. The picture is grainy and the connection, patchy. “Hi, I am Tali,” says 24-year-old Blumgart, who is pursuing a degree in Education at a university in Melbourne. “Like the one you eat from... thali,” she continues, as the girls dissolve into laughter. Thirteen-year-old Ritu, who is at the head of this happy delegation, is abruptly pushed aside to make way for Rashmi, the talkative one. “Hi ma’am. I’m Rashmi, I can speak,” she screams into the mike, sending her classmates into another giggling fit. Her friend Shivani too leans in and introduces herself. Even tongue-tied Ritu is introduced. And just like that, granny Blumgart and the girls begin their first online interaction.

The Granny Cloud project kicked off in Delhi in February this year, making the Kalkaji school the sixth Granny Cloud location in the country. When the project resumed in early July, after a long summer break, two new grannies had signed up and the children’s favourite granny Edna was back.

The project, an extension of the Hole in the Wall project started 15 years ago by Dr Sugata Mitra, professor at Newcastle University, was based on an idea of “grannies reading fairytales to children on Skype”. A few “benign mentors” volunteered, and in 2009, sessions began in Hyderabad. These sessions allow children to “self-learn” using the internet, with a little help from Skype grannies. Anything is up for discussion — from wildlife and festivals to families and futures. Described as a “playground in space”, the project is currently operational in six locations — Delhi, Pune and Hyderabad and in far-flung villages of rural Karnataka, in Rayalpadu and Rameshwarwadi, which boasts a single computer in one man’s house where children gather once a week to meet a granny. While Dr Mitra with Dr Suneeta Kulkarni chose Hyderabad for the pilot, at the other locations they decided to “let them come to us. We were then approached by schools and NGOs that were committed to the project,” says Pune-based Dr Kulkarni.

At Kalkaji, granny Blumgart’s session is making a nosedive. It’s her first session and she can’t tell how it’s going. “I don’t know what level the students are at yet,” says Blumgart, perhaps the only 24-year-old granny in the project. The eighth graders, despite their training in Math classes where they’re learning about linear pairs, are scrambling over a simple distance problem. When Blumgart asks them to convert the Melbourne-Delhi distance of 10,209km into centimetres, the girls look to Rashmi who turns to Google. When she asks them how many lakhs are in a million and how many millions in a billion — typing the questions on Skype — the students get busy copying the questions in notebooks before Rashmi yells “five minutes please” to go to the second computer in the tiny room to Google again. “Take 15,” says Blumgart, and before she knows it the session inches to an end. Rashmi is still stuck on spelling Melbourne correctly.

While most of the grannies are from UK, US and Australia — only one is from India — Dr Kulkarni says, “The good thing is that cultures, colour and accents don’t act as barriers.” About 50 grannies are taking sessions at the six locations, and 150 have volunteered since the project began. “But we need 350 grannies,” says Dr Kulkarni, who is busy recruiting.

Blumgart’s session is punctuated with long pauses, a faulty connection and a general air of hesitation. In contrast, the earlier session at 7.30am with another first-time granny — US-based Kari Thierer — had fared better. The kids had described the avian life in the school grounds and discovered opossums and raccoons in Thierer’s backyard. Yet, after both the sessions, Rekha Sharma, in-charge of the classes, remains optimistic. “A few months ago, when we started out, they didn’t know Google. They had no idea of how to type or search. Now they’re conversing in English and using the internet to learn,” she says. For Rashmi and her 49 classmates, these weekly sessions are the only face-time with computers.

Sixty-three-year-old Jackie Barrow from UK was one of the first granny recruits when the project started. Every Tuesday, Barrow logs in to interact with students at Pune, Rayalpadu and Rameshwarwadi, using a series of ice-breakers to include all the children — who is the oldest, tallest, youngest, shortest, etc. They try storytelling in some sessions, YouTube clips in others. Sometimes the sessions are satisfactory, sometimes frustrating. Last month, for instance, an ambitious attempt to use a Padlet for a power point presentation failed miserably. “It was bad,” says Barrow, adding that the kids dashed off a separate note later saying “we still like you very much”. In July 2012, BBC took Barrow to Pune, to meet her students for a televised series on the project. The students, who had often taken virtual tours of her home in Manchester, took her to theirs. For Halloween last year, when Barrow was explaining the festival to the kids at Rameshwarwadi in Sindhudurg, the lights went out. “They sat there with a single torch shining on their faces. It was pitch dark. And it was perfect,” says Barrow.

The grannies also have their own social network, a blog where they vent about failed sessions or pass on ideas that worked. “Besides, sometimes teachers try to show-off what they’ve taught in these sessions, and girls are almost always held back,” says Barrow.

Back in Kalakaji, as the second session ends, the girls reluctantly shuffle out of the lab. “This is our favourite class,” they chorus, as granny Blumgart says, “I wish I had told them I too learned something from them today — about the lakhs and the crores.”

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