In an attempt to foster innovation among government school students, Agastya International Foundation has come up with an interesting initiative. Engineering students across the state have now joined hands with government school students. The student techies will be mentoring the schoolchildren for a unique model-making competition, which is now in progress.
“We sent invitations to over 200 colleges in the state. We are not sure if there is any other competition that has brought engineering students and government schoolchildren together. The idea is to involve BE students in mentoring these children,” said Dilip Kumar, quality assurance leader, Agastya. One team comprised two BE students and two government schoolchildren from Class 9 and 10.
“Faculty from Agastya pay a visit the schools to authenticate if the models are really made by students,” he said.
Currently, about 80 projects have been submitted for consideration, of which 50 have been approved for the final round. The winner will take home a cash prize of Rs25,000, said Kumar.
“An exhibition will be held on February 7 and 8, and five projects will be recognised.
Prize money of Rs1 lakh will be distributed among the winners,” he said.
ISRO chairman might be one of the judges, he added.
The winning project will be chosen based on how innovative the model is. “Currently, we have a working model of a borewell water level monitoring system, which can be controlled using a mobile phone. We also have a propeller display that will electronically display any text that gets programmed into its chip. About 50% of the projects are based on electrical and electronic engineering,” said Kumar. He said that there are more participants from Bangalore when compared to rest of Karnataka.
“We have nine projects from Bangalore and Tumkur, and six from Mysore. Although we contacted colleges in Gulbarga, there were no entries at all. Next time, we will focus on these areas,” he said.
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