Dr. V. Anantha Narayanan, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, School of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore campus, delivered a session on ‘Physical Computing’ at the First Conference on Computational Thinking in Schools- CTiS 2019, held on April 20, 2019, at Pune. More than 140 delegates, which included teachers, principals and organisations working in the field of education from 20 cities and 7 states of the country, attended the conference. The conference was organized by CSpathshala, an ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) India initiative to provide a platform for educators to share their experiences, student learnings/stories, outcomes and interesting new experiments.

Prof. Venkatesh Raman, Program Chair, shared, “CTiS2019 makes a beginning with inviting participation from teachers implementing CSpathshala curriculum. CTiS 2019 received 55 abstracts and all abstracts showed, in general, a highly positive feedback on the curriculum. Of the 55 abstracts, 9 were selected for presentation based on some specific examples and experiences and the chairs invited two other presentations”. Out of 9 presentations, “T{h}inker – A Physical Computing Tool Kit “ was the only one from a Higher Education Institute (Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham) to support Computational Thinking in schools.