Vignesh Prasad is one of the collaborators at Vismaya Kalike. After doing his Bachelors in Computer Science at Georgia Tech he moved back to Bangalore (his hometown) with a view to work in the education space. He volunteered at a few non profits but unable to find the right match of ideas he ended up co-creating Vismaya Kalike with the community at Avalahalli and guidance from a few AIDers. Along with Vismaya Kalike, Vignesh also co-founded a startup. His startup, Crater Club raised over a million dollars and catered to 100,000+ users. Vignesh is passionate about learning how learning happens and enjoys playing golf, football and reading books. ------ Many ASER studies have been conducted in India around education and it is a well known fact that the situation is not spectacular. A vast majority of the learners nearly 7 of 8 display a flat learning profile i.e. despite spending a year in school they are not really learning anything. Nearly 60% of children of grade 5 are not able to read even a paragraph of grade 2 and around 80% of children of grade 5 cannot solve a simple sum of division. The covid pandemic has only made the situation worse. Vismaya Kalike is an initiative aimed at addressing just this. Taking learnings from Paulo Freire's idea of praxis and the Finnish Education System, ViKa aims to create joyful and democratic learning environments. The objective at these after school spaces is to make learning enjoyable for children and to allow them to craft their own learning journeys. We started with one centre at Avalahalli around five years ago and have since expanded to five learning centers across Bangalore. We cater to around two hundred children now predominantly first generation learners and those who are going to government schools. We have had to work on overcoming barriers and stigmas both our own as well as of the community to create truly inclusive spaces where everyone can feel welcome. We have learnt a lot in these five years, constantly iterating and experimenting on new ideas and methodologies. Some of our experiments have had incredible results like when we started a circle time for reflection at each centre, or when we established claps and chants to create a sense of community while others have failed spectacularly including when we tried to introduce basic coding to children when they had no idea how to interact with the computers at all. Vismaya Kalike is a learning journey not just for the children but also for us on how we can co-create with the community, environments that enable learning and curiosity.