Indian schools looking at robotics as new fun way of teaching

NEW DELHI: As select Indian school children prepare to participate in the World Robot Olympiad to be held in Taiwan, next month, schools across the country are displaying interest in introducing to students the fascinating and engaging field of robotics.
  
Sixty teams competed in the recently-held Indian Robotic Olympiad in the capital, which saw participation from 180 schools, a big leap from last year's figure of 18 schools in a competition that required contestants to build and program robots from a specially designed robotics kit.
  
The kit, supplied by 'Lego' comes with a multitude of parts and a CPU with inbuilt circuiting and students are judged by their ability to assemble and programme the robot to do specific tasks like walking from one point to the other on a straight line, navigating obstacles and other sundry chores.
  
Teams from Dhirubhai Ambani International School in Mumbai, the Amity International School and Vasant Valley School in Delhi and the St. John's High School in Chandigarh, have been selected to represent the India at World Robot Olympiad going to be held in November at Taiwan.
  
"All activities are challenge-based and you give the child, say of class eight, the task of making a walkie-talkie robot. It is a problem solving as well as a team building activity. The child is forced to think about the task and apply the laws of physics, engineering and computer science in solving the
problem and assembling the robot," says Sudhanshu Sharma, Director of Techtronics, India Ltd, adding that it encourages students to learn while building and constructing and brings out their potential and creativity.
  
"We don't have a robotics lab per se but we have all the things required for them to build," says Ms Balakrishnan of Vasant Valley School in the capital. "We find that the classes that are conducted as hobby courses are very popular among students. They are very engrossed and spent more than a month preparing for the competition."
 
"It integrates various disciplines like engineering, physics, mechanics, engineering, computer programming and electronics and is thus very exciting for the student," she says.
  
The Indian Robotics Organisation, the Indian chapter of the World Robotics Organisation, of which 23 countries are a member, conducts competitions for children annually. Last year it held the competition for the first time and took the winners to Naning in China.
  
"More than 5,000 schools in the country have the potential and the level to introduce robotics in classes," says Sudhanshu. "It is nothing for schools to invest three lakhs that can last them for three to five years. The robotic kits are very standard product and are very child friendly. It contains a sensors for light, touch, temperature as well as an ultrasonic sensor that are the eyes and the ears of the robot.

The CPU is a NXT brick that takes feedback from the programming fed in by the students and motors propel the robot," he says.
  
Though there is no available official figures the robotic industry is the country is estimated to be around Rs 500 crore. "Robots are popular in fields like automation in the medical industry, in building and paint shops in which they are a big thing. Our country produces such brilliant engineers and scientists and introducing robotics to children at an early age can foster their interest in science and engineering," says Sharma.
  
"We are planning to provide robotic sets to various schools across the country, train teachers and develop robotics clubs in schools," he says.
  
Sudipto Mukherjee, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, says,"So far India has been a consumer of technology. Unless society starts producing technology that can be consumed we are not going to survive. The century belongs to people who innovate unlike the last one where analysis and perfection were the buzzword and robotics is part of innovation."
  
Mukherjee says he was impressed by the enthusiasm of children participating in the contest. "Everybody had a standard robot kit and had to innovate to make the robot do the designated task. In colleges we have robotics and computer engineering courses but this is the first time that it has been introduced in schools." says Mukherjee, who was one of the judges at the IRO.
  
"At the competition everybody has the same LEGO kit and are given specific tasks that their robots would have to perform. You would want every robot that went there to do that. Except perhaps one or two, the remaining contestants were not up to the level. This shows that they still have a lot of catching up to do," he explains.
  
"Right now the physics curriculum that we have is very boring and very conceptual. So these robotics courses if they are integrated into the syllabus can sustain the interest of the children and make learning more exciting, says Bindu Balakrishnan.
   
"Intrest breeds in schools and spills over to colleges and other institutes of learning. They have a play-mat and the contestants who are competing in different categories of high school, junior high and junior have to navigate their robots from the start to the end and make them do specific tasks," she says.