Dr. Anantha Narayanan V., Assistant Professor and Dr. Shunmuga Velayutham C., Vice Chairperson and Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science Engineering, School of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham , Coimbatore, attended the IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (IEEE EDUCON 2019), organized by American University in Dubai, from April 9-11, 2019. A pre-conference workshop was also held on April 8, 2019.

The duo attended the pre­conference workshop titled “Engaging Students via Physical Computing” presented by Dr. Martin Capay from Constantine the Philosopher University. The workshop presented the BBC Microbit board as physical computing device to school students. In the afternoon, a workshop on “Learning Analytics Impact on Teaching and Instructional Design in Higher Education” was also attended .

On April 9, 2019, (first day of the conference), Dr. Anantha Narayanan presented the paper entitled “T{h}inker for Engaging Learning Experience in Computational Thinking and Programming”. The paper was well received. In fact, all physical computing related works employed physical computing tool kits available in the market. This was the only work which used indigeneously built physical computing tool kit.

The team from Constantine the Philosopher University, who presented a pre-conference workshop on Physical Computing, appreciated Amrita’s work and was interested to collaborate with us. “They in fact wanted to test our custom­ built physical computing device in their university,” shared Dr. Anantha Narayanan.

They also attended various talks and interacted with Dr. Siva Chandrasekaran of Swinburne Univeristy of Technology Australia, during the conference. “He has expressed interest to work with us on designing effective project­ based and lab­ based courses. He very much appreciated the model of our Computational Thinking and Problem Solving (CTPS) course,” he added.

They also interacted with Dr. Vinod Pangracious of American University, Dubai. He appreciated our custom­built physical computing tool kit and invited to collaborate with him in designing hardware devices for communication purposes.