After building low-cost board, School of Eminence students developing robot

Amritsar, May 6

Building a scientific temperament among students of government schools and providing them a platform for innovation, the ATAL Tinkering Lab at the School of Eminence, Mall Road, is currently working on a project to develop a robot. A team of students from the school, mentored by Kamal Kumar, lab in charge and a teacher at the school, have prepared a dummy robot and recently held a demonstration on the movements and gestures.

The lab established in the school in 2018, has proved to be a hub for nurturing young scientists, as students from the all-girls school have been part of several notable scientific achievements lately. “Our focus remains to provide resources and support to students, who come from lower income families, to achieve their potential.

The current project engages students from classes 9-12, where we applied principles of artificial intelligence (AI) and created prototype of robot. We are working on creating hand gestures, basic movements. The process is being completely run by our students,” shared Kamal, who is also in charge of the robotics programme in the school.

The school lab started with its AI-programme four years back, imparting knowledge and beginner level experiments with artificial intelligence. Last year, 10 students from the school were part of the project to develop the small satellite launch vehicle (SSLV) by ISRO. The girls also went to ISRO headquarters in Sriharikota to witness the launch of the satellite. The students also worked on a project to build raspberry board, which is a low cost, credit-card sized computer that plugs into a computer monitor or TV and uses a standard keyboard and mouse.

“It was an incredible achievement for our students as most of these girls come from very poor families and cannot even afford a mobile phone. To push them towards scientific excellence and see them turn innovators is what we put our efforts behind,” he said.

Kamal has also been inviting several students from schools in rural belt to visit the state-of-the-art laboratory and learn about AI technology. The other government schools in district to set up ATAL labs include schools in Nag Kalan, Chabba and Shivala Bhaiyan.