Integrating Education with Robotics Avishkaar develops construction kits to allow the students to build their own robots

With the nation moving towards becoming a technology hub, every youngster dreams of becoming an entrepreneur, develop something innovative and serve a purpose. Amidst the ambitious outlook lies the dilemma of focus. Between education and passion, what to prioritize? Being the breeding ground of biggest success stories - Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, the west might have accepted the dropout culture but in India, Education comes first.

Integrating Education & Technology

To promote determined minds, our education system is now encouraging the go-getters to enhance their practical experience along with theoretical knowledge. In colleges, it's via internship and onsite training but at the school level, there has to be a platform to integrate Education and Technology. This idea led to the inception of Avishkaar, a Robot manufacturing company which creates products, services and experiences to inspire the innovators of tomorrow.

Started as Building Blocks Learning Solutions Pvt Ltd in the year 2010, Avishkaar has evolved from first services to second solutions and now a product company. The organization's focus has always been to develop creativity and innovation amongst the children. To achieve the task, Avishkaar hosts IRC League which is touted as the biggest Science and Technology competition in the whole of South Asia and has close to 50,000 students participating every year.

The Evolution

Over the years, the company has set up Tinkering Labs in close to 700 schools across the country, partnered with the government over multiple projects and provided a platform for young brains to innovate. Sharing the kind of technology Avishkaar is using to ensure that the children are able to create different kinds of construction sets, Tarun Bhalla, the company's founder mentioned Tweak – their modular robotics design system for young learners.

"We (also) have a metal-bit construction set which can get very advanced and very basic as well, which is essential, Robotronics or Avishkaar robotics design system," he further added, sharing that their design systems can be interfaced with various other design systems, whether it is a lego design system, or a vex design system or a mechano design system. "We intend to create fairly intelligent artificially intelligent design systems, which can be used to teach different concepts."

The Enabler

Avishkaar's technology enables you to create something for a physical world, enables you to create something for our software world, which is essentially computers, or enables you to create something for app world as well, Tarun mentioned, adding, "We have something called an Avishkaar maker studio. It can be used to write software or firmware for our own intelligent machines." Many of the solutions build during Avishkaar's Mekathon have been picked by the regional governments to solve ground-level problems.

"This framework can be used to create firmware for intelligent devices and in future, this can be used to create an application for phones or application for virtual reality and augmented reality systems," Bhalla shared. To be able to do well in technology, one requires the coding, construction, designing and imagination skills altogether. India needs organizations like Avishkaar to enable the nation's youth realizing their dreams because the government can do it alone right?

(This article was first published in the May issue of Entrepreneur Magazine. To subscribe, click here)