NAGPUR: Under the ministry of human resource development, government of India's one laptop per child (OLPC) project 'Akash tablet' will be available in market in 3-4 months at a cost of around Rs 2,500. The tablet which will be the first of its kind to have a dual book and dual board as it will use both Android as well as Linux operating systems will perform the job of both, a tablet and a computer. It will be the cheapest tablet in the world.
The main man behind the project, professor Deepak Phatak from department of computer science and engineering at IIT, Bombay told TOI that four vendors have been shortlisted for the sales and the tablet would soon be available in market.
Phatak was in city to deliver the concluding key-note address at the two-day industrial symposium of Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology (VNIT). Known for his revolutionary work in transforming engineering education by training teachers for which he bagged the Padma Shree award in 2013, Phatak took the Akash tablet project as a challenge. Education apps and content was developed first for 1,000 devices for testing. The project aims at reaching 300 colleges and 1 lakh students. It is also being tested at four schools in Pandharpur for use in science and mathematics.
"Tablet has limited use. But we wanted to add computing to it so that it can be of use to every student who uses it. Hence we added the Linux system into it. An experiment is also on in Bhikamgaon in Khargon district in Madhya Pradesh for Standard IX students. Each tablet will be preloaded with all educational applications whether the user wants it or not to serve its basic purpose," said Phatak.
In an effort to improve engineering education, Phatak conducted a sabbatical experiment and surveyed 67 smaller engineering colleges in the country. He found that though the standard of education was pathetic in these colleges each of them had at least a handful of students who were sharp and hardworking. They were there not by choice but by chance. These students he thought should have been in IIT. Similarly, he also found brilliant teachers who were forced into the routine teaching methodology of lecturing. It was here that he decided to train these teachers to change the education standard.
Phatak switched the teaching into a 'flip' type where instead of listening to a teacher in class and doing the homework the students were asked to listen to a lecture at home and engage into interaction and only question answer sessions, problem solving in class. It brought totally unexpected but very positive results. He has already trained 36,000 teachers to use this method and will be training total 1.5 lakh teachers.
