You Laugh! You Learn!

'Learn. Laugh. Remember.,' reads the tagline on the LaughGuru website (www.laughguru.com), a start-up by alumni of IIT Bombay and St. Xavier's College. The site uses humour to teach children core concepts in English, Math and Science. In the 20 days since the site launched, it has drawn approximately 650 students, from standards V to VIII across boards. In the next few days, it is looking to expand its offerings to cater to kids from I to VIII.

"We use humour through visuals—with which a large number of kids are comfortable, jokes—mostly one liners, material kids can relate to in daily life and audio files—mainly voice-overs for videos and slide shows, says Vaibhav Devanathan, Founder of LaughGuru. For instance, LaughGuru uses Bollywood heroes to explain Newtons' Laws of Motion. Cartoon versions of Bollywood heroes break every one of the laws and all kids have to do is recall these scenes and invert them to remember the law. Does the humour depart from facts? "Facts are non-negotiable and cannot change. Bollywood is a great way to teach students about Newton's laws of motion, but we cannot change the facts, so we mould a story around them," Vaibhav tells us. "Humour reduces learning time by 75-80 per cent. With online software, there's no need to write on a blackboard and have kids copy it down in books. Quick visual feedback (sad or happy face for the wrong or right answer) encourages children to try and get more funny faces thus helping them to learn quickly".

Usha Nayak, mother of 11-year-old Valerie, who has been using laughguru.com for about two months, says "It removed the tedium and lightened her study sessions. She was eager to know what's next and was more engaged, while otherwise I find it difficult to pin her down. It's child-friendly and visually appealing. Valerie is less distracted. She will be going to the sixth standard and has already started looking at the new curriculum on LaughGuru".

But how does humour actually help the kids? A research paper published in the International Journal of Education and Psychological Research (IJEPR) says, "Humorous content was found to have better results than non-humorous content in a learning paradigm. Schmidt (1994) found that humorous sentences were recalled better than non-humorous sentences in lists containing both sentence types. Humour can act as a strong retrieval cue, because (a) humorous information is remembered better, thus becoming an efficient cue and because (b) it activates deeper processing which leads to a stronger association between the humorous content and the material that has to be remembered. In a classroom setting, humour can have additional beneficial effects on learning, such as the creation of a favourable atmosphere in the classroom, which is related to better retention of content and the creation of a more pleasant social climate, altering and negating the various barriers present in the traditional classroom setting and increasing interest in subject matter for students, as well as teachers."

LaughGuru's three-tier team involves principals and teachers, who share their advice about the difficult topics in the syllabus; advisors who are experts in each subject and are in touch with the syllabus; and a set of writers, who use these inputs to create interactive study material. There are more than 800 'games' in different funny formats: videos that weave a funny story around a concept; summary pictures that help revise a concept; fun versions of cricket and football, where correct answers result in runs or goals scored, quiz-game shows that help students understand the steps in solving a problem; joke-based games, in which students win a joke for every correct answer;grid-based games, where students reveal parts of a funny picture with correct answers and more.

LaughGuru plans to create products for grades IX and X by July and for grades XI and XII by September. They also hope to expand beyond Math, English and Science to History, Geography and other subjects.

Practical Advice:
If you're trying to incorporate humour into learning at home try this:

Connect what your kids learn to objects in daily life. Say, a family is watching a film together, try and link parts of the film to concepts that they're learning, thus making education tool.

Use mnemonic devices to remember information like VIBGYOR for the colours of the rainbow. Make up mnemonics for anything that has an order. You can even use names of relatives or funny incidents.

Do not be afraid of using silly humour and puns to help children understand something. There are a whole host of terrible science jokes (for example - Since light travels faster than sound, some people appear bright till you hear them speak) that make their readers groan, but actually help them remember various facts (e.g. this fact helps them understand why lightning is seen before thunder is heard).