‘Curiosity Conference’ held at IIT Gandhinagar emphasised the need to feed curiosity at all levels and ages for learning, research, and innovation

Gandhinagar: The Curiosity Lab of the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (IITGN), in partnership with the Center for Curiosity, USA, hosted the ‘Curiosity Conference’ at IITGN on August 12 and 13, 2023. The two-day conference had a series of expert talks, workshops, poster presentations, and an exhibition by practising professionals to deliberate on the vital role of curiosity in improving education, learning, research, and workplace practices and its importance in driving innovation and progress across various fields.

Sharing a brief inaugural message virtually, Mr Kushal Sacheti, Founder and President, Centre for Curiosity, USA, said, “I believe that curiosity is a trait that can be cultivated. We don’t know enough about curiosity to distinguish between cultivated, innate, or subject-specific curiosity. As long as you keep learning and connecting it to whatever you know, the world becomes bigger and bigger. Our endeavour in this conference is to understand more about curiosity and learn how we can make minds more curious.”

In his virtual talk, ‘Is reward good for students?’, Prof Kou Murayama, Professor, Hector Institute for Empirical Educational Research, University of Tubingen, Germany, shared insights on how the reward-based system may not help in building natural curiosity and said, “External rewards for doing something may be damaging because in that case, students/people are basically motivated to do an activity or perform a task for the reward rather than the intrinsic satisfaction it provides. Therefore, when the reward disappears, the learner may lose their inherent motivation and not perform the task without the reward. This is called the undermining effect. However, extrinsic rewards can be a good starting point to help learners develop a positive association with exploration. If learners are rewarded for exploratory behaviour when they are curious and fulfil their curiosity by finding the right information, it forms a positive feedback loop. Learners can then continue to be curious without the need for extrinsic rewards.”

In another insightful virtual talk on ‘Curiosity from the lifespan perspective: How our emotions and motivation are affected by ageing?’, Prof Michiko Sakaki, Professor, Hector Institute for Empirical Educational Research, University of Tubingen, Germany, said, “We tend to think that people become less curious as they age, but this is not true. An experiment showed that older people were much more curious about learning the answers to trivial questions than younger people. While the specific subjects that older people are curious about change with age, an experiment shows that they stayed curious much longer than younger people when they were learning about a new topic.”

Speaking on the ‘The Power of Curiosity’, Prof Perry Zurn, Provost Associate Professor, American University, USA, said, “Curiosity doesn’t know the boundaries of discipline and invites thinkers to look at the edges of knowledge, which can foster new questions; just like edge-ecologies that exist between two distinguishable ecologies. Curiosity enables us to tear down existing ideas in order to build new knowledge.” She invited the audience to think about contexts in which we use, encourage, and educate about curiosity.

Sharing perspectives on ‘Curiosity in Education’, Prof Jaison Manjaly, Jasubhai Memorial Chair Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science and Organiser of the conference, IITGN, said, “We need to reflect on challenges that plague education in India. By being mindful of these problems, we can leverage curiosity-based research and its recommendations.” He invited the audience to get out of their comfort zones and try to do new things.

Prof Aditi Kothiyal, Assistant Teaching Professor, Center for Creative Learning, IITGN, presented some of her findings on robot buddies (Nao, QT, Thymio, and Cellulo) that help children learn. She introduced the audience to a variety of robots and their potential uses in the classroom. In addition, she highlighted how these robots created empathy and engagement in children and invited educators to think about using these strategies in their classes.

The two-day conference also saw about 45 poster presentations by teachers, educators, researchers, and science communicators; hands-on workshops by illustrators, science communicators, researchers, and CCL-IITGN on improving curiosity in classrooms and workplaces; and a ‘Curiosity Exhibition’ featuring examples of artwork and outreach work on curiosity. The interactive exhibits, a collection of 100 drawings of curious people in history, and curious artefacts of history by Prof Argha Manna, Artist-in-Residence, IITGN, sparked the curiosity of the visitors.

Curiosity is a powerful motivator for people to seek new knowledge or experiences to widen their perspectives. It is frequently sparked by awe or ambiguity and can lead to the discovery of new ideas, knowledge, and new opportunities, which can improve creativity and problem-solving abilities. While incorporating curiosity as a tool in education enhances learning and retention of information to improve learning outcomes, fostering curiosity in the workplace has been linked to increased creativity, innovation, and problem-solving skills, resulting in improved performance and productivity.

Around 200 researchers, educators, teachers, school principals, and industry professionals from around the world participated in the conference.