Through an initiative by The Department of Science and Technology (DST), AMMACHI Labs, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham has conducted a series of workshops at Amrita Vidyalayam, Thalaserry called: “Empowering School children in 21st Century Skills”. The pilot program included three online workshops on 21st century skills for school children in classes 7-12 in the following topics:

• Social Making: Micro:Bit for IoT Projects
• Social Media and Safe Spaces
• Web Design and Development

These hands-on workshops introduced the children to think out of the box, innovate and build Internet of Things (IoT) solutions for societal problems that they see around them, trained students about the existing social media networks and how to navigate the web and social media safely, and provided basic CSS and HTML knowledge for the children to design, develop and launch their own website.

The technology workshops were a pilot evaluation of the state of the art e-learning content that AMMACHI Labs has developed for the DST project which aims to:
– Provide 21st century skills education that both inspires and informs action
– Empower and inspire children to become technology champions
– Provide an understanding of technology to solve global challenges. 

Students were very heartened by the workshops and said the following:  “It was a wonderful experience, at first we have no idea how we will make our idea into a real one. A very big thanks to Gayathri mam who took the effort to teach us about the Micro:Bit and other things.The sessions were wonderful, we had a lot of fun learning!”

Here are some of the glimpses of the children’s work from the online workshops

Project 1: Smart necklace for promoting women’s safety and security
Project 2: Gesture and voice controlled wheelchair for the blind
Project 3: Automatic irrigation machine
Project 4: Prototype for sewage cleaning
Project 5: Smart transportation using solar car

This educational initiative fosters 21st century skills in school children and AMMACHI Labs hopes to conduct more in the future.