Reviving interest in botany is this govt school’s mission

Sanjay Yadav

To revive the lost interest of students in botany, Government Senior Secondary School, Bajghera, in Gurugram has allotted QR codes to all trees on campus. The code, when scanned, provides the names, year of plantation and medicinal benefits of each tree.

With reduced greens across the NCR, a majority of students fail to even identify usual trees or value common ones, including Neem. The initiative is the brainchild of Manoj Kumar Lakra, an elementary school headmaster, aiming to make these trees an inseparable part of their growing years.

Nowadays, students don’t know the correct information about all trees, plants in their schools, nor do they know the names of trees. When students go to visit any garden to get specific information and want more information about a particular plant, they use Google.

But now, the students of Bajghera school will not need Google because more than 30 trees and plants in the school have QR codes. Lakra keeps innovating while teaching and has even taught students how to generate the QR code.

Class XI students Sonu and Himanshu said their teacher had taught them how to generate the QR code. Inspired by that, they made a periodic table of QR code for 130 NCERT books of Class I to X last year and even that of a Hindi grammar book. The QR code with specific information of every tree or plant in the school is being prepared and planted on every tree, so that students can get information any time.

The initiative of QR code was started around two weeks ago at the school and more than 31 trees have QR codes now, while QR code on more than 50 trees will be generated soon. The students of Class XI have been taught how to generate codes and they have put up these codes on all school library books. Seeing its success, the school thought of using the same to save trees.

What is a QR Code

• Quick Response (QR) codes are barcodes that can be read by a smart phone's cameras. These are two-dimensional barcodes that can be scanned by a mobile device equipped with a camera that has a connection to the internet.
•  QR code is unique to a web page.
• These can be copied and printed on posters, books, websites, magazines, newspapers and even T-shirts.
• Once the code is scanned, the mobile device will read through the code and information embedded within the code will be revealed. Although QR codes mostly store URL information, any type of information can be coded within the QR code.
• As their popularity increases, QR codes are now being incorporated into other fields and used for communicating with people and consumers in different forms.

Advantages of using these codes

There are several advantages of using QR codes to list plants. A major benefit is that it saves time and money. Students do not need to waste time for information and they can easily scan the QR code and store the information in a PDF format on their phone for easy viewing. The information about trees and plants can also be shared via a smart phone.