The National Institute of Transforming India’s (NITI Aayog) Atal Innovation Mission, the Central Board of Secondary Education, and a private player are collaborating to improve the education sector by adding IT skills to the formal curriculum.
The larger aim is to align the National Education Policy 2020’s (NEP 2020) guidance to increase the pace of tech integration for youth, bridge the future skills gap in the country, and optimise the current infrastructure (including Atal Tinkering Labs) towards making India AI-ready. Together, they launched the AIoT Integration in School Curriculum in September 2022 and initiated a pilot.
A recent showcase, which was the outcome of the pilot programme, included a display of AIoT integration-based lesson plans created by teachers after they were trained by experts from the academic and technology sector. It also included a demonstration of AI and AIoT-enabled social impact projects built by students using tinkering and AI, with guidance from their teachers. The hosting organisations also released a compendium with 70 lesson plans to promote digital readiness.
The compendium is a collection of lesson plans created by the teachers and each one provides a comprehensive understanding of how AIoT integration can be used to enhance learning in a classroom. For example, one of the lesson plans for class 9, helps to guide the students to analyse the reason for back pain and develop an AI-led solution where an LED light glows every time it detects incorrect posture and green light glows once the correct posture is retained.
In another lesson plan for social science, a student is guided to first make use of the design thinking process to understand why plants die in winter. The student is given insight into using tinkering tools like sensors and Arduino UNO to record the moisture level of the soil and then supported to deploy a supervised AI model to predict the plant’s health by making use of the recorded data.
According to an industry expert, the new methodology will enable the shift in teaching pedagogies from traditional to digital with several additional benefits and increased efficiency. Integrating AI with lesson plans and making them part of everyday teaching-learning activities can help enable the students to imbibe the digital-first mindset.
One of the objectives of the project is to empower teachers with skillsets, mindsets, and toolsets to integrate AI and Tinkering. Through this methodology, students are expected to gain a thorough understanding of how emerging technologies can be used impactfully and responsibly.
To bolster the rate of digital literacy in the country, state governments have been urged to offer courses and initiatives in AI and other emerging technologies. Last year, the Indian Institute of Technology of Madras (IIT-Madras)’s Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (RBC-DSAI) invited students to the national-level ‘Summer Internships 2022’ programme. The goal was to help students gain hands-on experience working on cutting-edge discoveries, with some of the country’s leading experts in data science and AI, as OpenGov Asia reported.
Last May, the Council for Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE) and the Indian Institute of Technology of Delhi (IIT- Delhi) jointly designed a curriculum for schools that include robotics, AI, machine learning, and data science. The curriculum was for grades 9 to 12 in schools affiliated with the CISCE board.
