The Department of Science and Technology (DST) and AMMACHI Labs conducted a series of workshops at Amrita Vidyalayam Thalassery called: “Empowering School children in 21^st Century Skills”.

Through an initiative by the Department of Science and Technology (DST), AMMACHI Labs, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham has conducted a series of workshops at Amrita Vidyalayam Thalassery called: “Empowering School children in 21^st Century Skills”. The pilot program included three online workshops on 21^st century skills for school children in classes 7-12 in the following topics:

• Social Making: Micro:Bit for IoT Projects
• Social Media and Safe Spaces
• Web Design and Development

These hands-on workshops introduced the children to think out of the box, innovate and build Internet of Things (IoT) solutions for societal problems that they see around them, trained students about the existing social media networks and how to navigate the web and social media safely, and provided basic CSS and HTML knowledge for the children to design, develop and launch their own website.

The technology workshops were a pilot evaluation of the state of the art e-learning content that AMMACHI Labs has developed for the DST project which aims to:

• Provide 21^st century skills education that both inspires and informs action
• Empower and inspire children to become technology champions
• Provide an understanding of technology to solve global challenges.

The master trainers for the workshops were Ms. Gayathri Manikutty, Asst. Professor, Robotics and Automation, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Ms. Gouri Latha Ekkirala, Senior Specialist – Technical Communications, Persistent Systems, Malaysia and Ms. Nihal Kaur, E4Life PhD student, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham.

Some of the students were very heartened by the workshops and said the following:

“It was a wonderful experience, at first we had no idea how we would make our idea into a real one. A very big thanks to Gayathri mam who took the effort to teach us about the Micro:Bit and other things. The sessions were wonderful, we had a lot of fun learning!”

This educational initiative fosters 21^st century skills in school children and AMMACHI Labs hopes to conduct more in the future.