Rethinking learning through curiosity

As a child, I remember asking several question from my mother: Why is the sky blue during daytime? Why does the moon change its shape everyday? How do fish breathe underwater? This instinct to understand the things around us, this strong desire characterised by wonder and exploration, is curiosity. It plays an important role in learning, pushing individuals to seek out new experiences. It guides higher-order processes like memory formation and making decisions. 

Inviting reflections on how curiosity shapes flexible thinking, creativity, and problem-solving, the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar hosted the Curiosity Conference 2026 on March 21–22. The third edition of the conference brought together scholars, scientists, artists, engineers, and school students to foster interdisciplinary dialogue. This year’s theme was at the intersection of art, science, and technology. The discussions focused on how education should focus on exploration-driven learning. 

According to conference coordinators Dr Jaison Manjaly and Argha Manna, “Any knowledge system in the world would not have been possible without curiosity!” Dr Jaison is a Jasubhai Memorial Chair Professor, and Mr Manna is an artist-in-residence at the Department of Humanities and Social Science, IITGN. They believe that there is a need to move beyond rigid systems and cultivate curiosity across fields in education, something which is consistently emphasised by IITGN.

Initiatives like the Curiosity Lab at the Institute are the result of this mindset. “We wanted to create a space where people from different domains can come together to have constructive discussions about the power and potential of curiosity,” they said. 

The conference honoured the contributions of late Kushal Sacheti, an alumnus of IIT Kanpur and the Founder and CEO of Galaxy USA Inc. and the Centre for Curiosity, New York, USA. A visionary entrepreneur, philanthropist, and advisor, he supported the Curiosity Lab and IITGN in many ways. He loved engaging with students and encouraged them to ponder everyday questions. His family members, Poonam Sacheti and Astav Sacheti, shared how Kushal inspired them to always be curious. This ability to question and eventually understand things shaped their journeys profoundly. 

Two Ways of Seeing the Same World 

The conference speakers underlined that curiosity is deeply personal yet universally essential. The keynote session by Sukant Saran explored how science and art are two distinct ways of recording and interpreting nature. Mr Saran is a physicist-turned-artist at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. According to him, science and art are representations of reality that expand our consciousness and vision. Science seeks to understand reality through logic, while art does that through intuition and emotion. Mr Saran discussed the idea of ‘public’ and ‘private’ science. While the former is a polished and structured version encountered in textbooks, the latter is where real discovery happens. It is deeply human and involves debates, failures, and sudden insights, among other factors. It was also noted that since humans are naturally drawn to patterns, rhythms, and harmony, this has influenced many artistic creations and scientific discoveries. Through a series of sculptures, Mr Saran illustrated how scientific concepts, ranging from the intricacies of atoms that are the building blocks of everything around us to space-time theories, can be expressed artistically, inspiring curiosity. His works also showed the idea of duality, with opposites such as order and disorder, particle and wave, matter and antimatter coexisting and defining each other. Eventually, it is not only about scientific truth and artistic beauty but also about scientific beauty and artistic truth! 

Extraordinary in the Ordinary 

Artist-in-residence at the Hampi Art Lab, Arvind Sundar’s keynote discussed mathematics, geometry, and infinity through the lens of art. With examples such as the golden ratio and fractals, his works demonstrated how math can inspire visual forms. While the essence of the golden ratio involves making things aesthetically pleasing, fractals are never-ending and mesmerising patterns! The beauty of fractals can be found in the Virupaksha Temple at Hampi, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site dedicated to Lord Shiva. Moreover, this concept is also embedded in the Indian philosophic view that the microcosm (individual) is a reflection of the macrocosm (universe). Mr Sundar also highlighted circle packing into a square and geometric constructions as generating intricate art forms. Einstein shapes or aperiodic tilings are another fascinating example of the intersection of math and art. These can fill space without ever repeating a predictable pattern. Further, contemporary artist Shailesh BR showed his works that translate complex theories into mechanised installations, exhibited globally at venues like the Daejeon Museum of Art. 

Seeing the Unseen 

Interdisciplinary researcher Pratyasha Nath, with Associate Professor Jenia Mukherjee from IIT Kharagpur, highlighted the wonders of visual arts to “see the unseen” in science. They emphasised that sometimes, the ‘unseen’ is due to one’s perspectives, depending on what one considers worth or not worth ‘seeing.’ For example, Pratyasha talked about termites, typically dismissed as pests by many people but worshipped and considered sacred by indigenous communities. Such perceptions are shaped by cultural bias. Another example is how fungi connect ecosystems in complex ways and play crucial roles in functions like nutrient exchange with plants. These ‘invisible’ systems are significantly involved in sustaining life on Earth. Through their comics, ‘Fables of the Anthropocene,’ Pratyasha and Dr Mukherjee showed that such research can be translated into relatable and curiosity-inducing narratives. 

They help create more accessible, emotional, and inclusive realities. The session suggested that perhaps the path forward lies in learning to see the unseen differently and constructively. 

Indian medical artist and imaging scientist Kaushik Ghosh underscored the importance of “jal, jungle, jameen” (water, forest, land) and their relationships with people as a relational way of “seeing” health. Dr Ghosh is associated with the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education & Research, Chandigarh. He emphasised that children encounter the world without labels, but as they age and learn, labelling comes into the picture and starts becoming a limiting feature. It categorises and determines what should be visible versus invisible. In public health, this labelling is influenced by viewpoints and shapes how issues like illnesses and communities are perceived. Through his photographs, Dr Ghosh traced a journey from the individual level to the community level and showed how care transforms as it scales. Instead of considering health as biological, it is vital to understand it as an interaction among the environment, culture, and lived experience. By combining scientific observation with visual storytelling, Dr Ghosh demonstrated how curiosity can reveal what is often overlooked and what truly matters. 

A Room that Opens Doors to the World 

On the second day of the conference, founder and executive director of the ArtSparks Foundation, Nisha Nair, shared her journey of establishing creative learning labs in under-resourced government schools, marking the beginning of a new approach to education! She began with a story from about a decade ago, when she went to a government school asking for space, which was not just physical but also pedagogical: A room where children could come every week during school time to explore and be ‘themselves.’ She wanted to give them an education that is creative and meaningful. The creative learning labs she established are spaces that promote collaboration among students as compared to individualism and competition. Here, children look at mistakes as valuable learning opportunities. They try to understand what paper could do through crafts and how clay could hold different shapes! Ms Nair discussed initiatives like ‘Project Empower’ for girl students, where art takes the learning outside the confinements of classrooms. She narrated an experience where students created life-sized puppets during one of the projects to represent issues in their communities. The activity involved elements from different domains.

For example, discussions on social issues were concerned with civics, narratives included language, and scales and proportions of the puppets brought in mathematics. Learning was no longer abstract; it was messy and real, highlighting that arts and curiosity can help us re-envision what an effective education system may look like. 

Dr Andrea Kantrowitz, Associate Professor, State University of New York, presented drawing as a fundamental cognitive tool that enables observation and discovery. An interactive exercise during the session required participants to scribble on paper without looking, then exchange those pieces and make additions to their neighbours’ work and interpret the piece together. The exercise revealed something fundamental: there is not always one right answer. Drawing helps us embrace uncertainty and observe closely. It is not mere decoration, but adaptive and reflective thinking made visible.

Curious Questions and Patterns 

The virtual session by Dr Aditya Singh, postdoctoral researcher, University of Giessen, mentioned how effective learning depends on asking the right questions at the right time that can sustain curiosity. In the case of children, simple questions help build foundations. However, as they age, complex questions give room to deeper exploration. Questions range from those that help individuals move broadly across different ideas (busybody) to going in depth with respect to a topic (hunter). At home, young children ask many questions driven by curiosity about the world. In school, the number of questions drops dramatically. Why? While classroom questions are largely treated as evaluations, the questions at home are more open-ended. This difference shapes how curiosity can be expressed and utilised in different contexts. 

The session by physicist-turned-journalist Pallab Roygupta, a core member of IIT Madras’s ‘Shaastra’ magazine, showed profound connections between art and science. He elaborated on how the swirling patterns in van Gogh’s famous art piece, ‘The Starry Night,’ were analysed later by scientists to resemble concepts from fluid dynamics. Similarly, Jackson Pollock’s artwork, which at first sight appeared to be random, later revealed the presence of fractals according to science. Picasso’s idea of cubism, which breaks objects down into simple shapes and shows them from multiple viewpoints, appears to be inspired by Maurice Princet’s idea of the fourth dimension. These examples underlined that effective learning is about how we engage with information, and curiosity is a necessary component to achieve it. 

The conference also included three panel discussions, which involved the keynote speakers and Dr Manjaly, along with Dr Neeldhara Misra, Dr Madhu Vadali, and Dr Ambika Aiyadurai, Associate Professors at the Departments of Computer Science and Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Humanities and Social Sciences, IITGN.

Critical discussions included bringing science and engineering into artistic practices, crafting stories through artistic and scientific lenses, and examining art as an essential component of curiosity and education. Workshops and a poster session, including hands-on activities and discussions. They provided the platforms to participants for engaging with interdisciplinary ideas and understanding that curiosity is a necessity that equips us to navigate an ever-evolving world! 

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Apeksha Srivastava, PhD student and Science Writer at the Indian Institute of Technology, authored this story.