India's Only School at the 30th AMI Montessori Congress

What This Is About

On May 1–4, 2026, the Association Montessori Internationale — the organisation founded by Dr. Maria Montessori in 1929 — holds its 30th International Congress at the Centro Internacional de Congresos in Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico. The congress is the triennial global gathering of the Montessori community, bringing together educators, researchers, and practitioners from over 15 countries.

Blue Blocks Montessori School, Hyderabad, is the only school from India presenting at this congress. Co-founders Pavan Goyal and Munira Hussain lead an official breakout session on May 3rd. Blue Blocks adolescents separately present their student-built satellite programme alongside adolescent presentations from Montessori schools worldwide.

The congress features keynote speakers including Dr. Gabor Maté (Order of Canada, bestselling author of *The Myth of Normal*), Dr. Adele Diamond (Canada Research Chair, University of British Columbia), Dr. Angeline Stoll Lillard (University of Virginia), and AMI President Professor Alain Tschudin (Stellenbosch University).

Media Brief

Key Numbers

- 19 years of continuous operation (est. 2005)
- 1,047 children in longitudinal data panel
- 45,000+ parents engaged through workshops worldwide
- 30+ open-access research publications across Zenodo, OSF, SSRN, Harvard Dataverse
- 5 patents filed by school-age children in drone design
- 1 CubeSat satellite payload authorised by IN-SPACe, Govt. of India (SBB-1)
- 4 AMI diplomas held by founder Pavan Goyal — first person globally with this combination
- 2 campuses — Gachibowli and Tellapur, Hyderabad
- 0 other schools from India presenting at this congress

The Satellite Story

SBB-1 was a student-designed and student-built CubeSat payload that received formal authorisation from IN-SPACe, the Department of Space, Government of India (Reference PMA/IN-SPACe/AUTH/2026/115). It was integrated with ISRO's PSLV-C62 launch vehicle and launched on January 12, 2026. The launch experienced an anomaly during the ascent phase, and the payload was lost — through no fault in the SBB-1 hardware, which had completed its full qualification campaign.

Blue Blocks treated the loss as a documented research protocol, not a programme failure. Three independent observation streams tracked the experience: the engineering record, the learner-development record, and the programme-level record.

At the congress, Blue Blocks formally announces SBB-2 — the second-generation student-built satellite. SBB-2 incorporates three methodological improvements: an external academic partner from the concept phase, a pre-registered observation protocol with an external co-investigator, and an independently auditable data pipeline.

The student team has also filed five patents in drone design, dedicated to Dr. Maria Montessori on her 150th birthday.

The Design Thinking Workshop

The official breakout session — *Montessori and Innovation: A Design Thinking Workshop for a Changing World* — combines a presentation on how Montessori pedagogy builds innovative capacity across the developmental continuum with a hands-on workshop. Educators and students practise Design Thinking together as active collaborators, working through empathy, ideation, and prototyping in real time.

The session draws on Blue Blocks Micro Research Institute's 19-year longitudinal data panel of 1,047 Indian children — the only data panel of its kind in India tracking children across the full AMI Montessori continuum from birth to 18 years.

The pre-registration for this congress presentation is published open-access: DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/ST9H2

Quotes

*"Presenting in Mérida alongside researchers of the calibre of Adele Diamond and Gabor Maté is the result of 19 years of trusting children. Our students built a satellite. The data from 1,047 children over 19 years tells us why. That story belongs on the world stage."*
— Pavan Goyal, Co-founder & Principal Investigator

*"These are not students presenting a school project. They are the engineers who designed, prototyped, tested, and built a satellite payload that received formal authorisation from the Government of India. They are presenting their own work, in their own words, to the world's foremost Montessori community."*
— Munira Hussain, AMI Auxiliary Trainer & Co-founder

Source Verification

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Related Publications

• SBB-1 to SBB-2: Open Announcement
• IN-SPACe Authorisation Certificate
• AMI Congress Pre-registration
• Iran Crisis Case Study
• Blue Blocks Micro Research Methodology

Media Contact

Sruthi Matta, Research Team Lead
Blue Blocks Micro Research Institute
Email: press.research@blueblocks.in

For high-resolution images, additional photos, or to arrange interviews with the students or school leadership, contact the address above.

Blue Blocks Montessori School · blueblocks.in
Blue Blocks Micro Research Institute · research.blueblocks.in
Gachibowli & Tellapur · Hyderabad, Telangana 500032 · India