Interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary studies are key to many success stories of Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham’s research projects. Ministry of HRD’s National Mission in Education through Internet and Communication Technologies (NMEICT) had funded a massive project on building Virtual Laboratories for students who did not have access to laboratory education and skill training.
A success story of this 8-year old project has been reported and covered by the “CSI Communications” magazine of the Computer Society of India as a cover article. Authored by Dr. Krishnashree Achuthan, Rakhi Radhamani, Dhanush Kumar, Nijin Nizar, Dr. Bipin Nair and Dr. Shyam Diwakar, the June 2017 issue of CSI’s cover story is titled “Design and Implementation of ICT Based Virtual Labs for Laboratory Skill Education”, which is available at this link.
Professors and staff from Amrita School of Biotechnology and Amrita School of Engineering including the Center for Research on Advanced Technologies for Education (AmritaCREATE), with several artists and animators, have developed interactive learning tools through simulations, data-based animations and remotely controlled equipments, as labs for students, available on the internet. It is called the Virtual Amrita Laboratories Universalizing Education (VALUE). While biologists and biotechnologists looked into mapping data and actions into the simulations(as termed by computer scientists), the physicists, data scientists and engineers connects the equipment via devices like Raspberry Pi and Arduino to make remotely-controlled experiments and mathematical simulations that could be accessed over the web.
Since the project’s official launch in February 2012, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham has been actively reaching out to other universities, colleges, students and professors to help them use the virtual labs as curriculum content and tools to enhance education. Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham used a nodal center program to reach out to colleges and has more than 95 colleges across the country as nodal centers. The Virtual Labs project is a collaboration with Indian Institutes of Technology (Delhi, Kharagpur, Kanpur, Guwahati, Roorkee, Bombay), IIIT Hyderabad, COE Pune, Dayalbagh University and NIT Karnataka and are freely available via Amrita website [link] and national websites [link1],[link2].
The Computer Society of India (CSI) Communications is the national journal and magazine of CSI. It has a circulation of over 100,000 and has been published regularly for the last 40 years. Prof. Prashant Nair, Vice-Chairman, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Amrita School of Engineering, Coimbatore is the current editor of CSI communications. Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham has been part of CSI with student branches in all campuses and have won best student branch awards.
