Target group:
1. RPL Participants: Students of grade 6 to Grade 10 students, School drop outs or illiterate in the age group of less than 15 years. 2. Coach: Students/drop outs/illiterate and aged less than 25 years. 3. Other Beneficiaries: All aged group village people mainly students and youth.
Specific intervention:
Season 1 of RPL was on Robotics. It was about exploring self-learning in rural and tribal students. Also it should be able to create a team of like-minded people across all age groups for exploring innovation.
Time frames (when begun and ended or when intended to begin and end)
Begun on 15th April 2019 and ended on 10th December 2019.
Implementation Summary:
Creating the Village Teams: Our team members went to 90 villages and created awareness for the RPL 2019 visiting number of people including Sarpanch(Village Head), Students, Teachers and tried to make a team as per the norms of the tournament. Each team of students having less than 15 year of age must have one government school student. Also it must comprise of any one of a divyang ora girl or a school dropout or an illiterate. Also the team must have one coach preferably having technical background who is aged less than 25 years from the village. Like IPL, the team also must have their team name associated with their village name eg. Mangadh Genius (in the lines of Chennai Super kings). Teams were given all kits and online assistance. Village Sarpanch was involved in all modalities so he was made mentor of the Team. RPL team consistent efforts resulted in 60 teams as planned. Team has to come to Idar at RPL on an average it is about 20 kms away from different villages. The only expenditure for the team is transportation.
Zonal Rounds: All 60 teams were divided in six zones as per their location. They were given Robotics basic kits and informed on how to go about making the Robot. They were given ideas on what kind of challenges they will undergo during the Zonals. Our organizing team went to villages to give ideas about the challenges and to boost confidence if they needed to before one week of the Zonal rounds. Two technical competitions named RoboRace and MazeHunter were organized to test their skills, commonsense & technical aspects of Robot. Their model design skills were tested by the challenge of Design Your Dreams. Teams were assessed for their punctuality, team outlook, and number of people they taught at their village. In 3 days Zonal tournaments, 12 teams were finalized for the RPL finals. They were given add-on kits (to upgrade their basic robot) on the same days and they were given problem statements on WhatsApp groups to prepare themselves for the finals to be held just one week after.
Final Rounds: The teams participated in the finals with real passion as they faced five challenges on the same day back to back. Three technical challenges were Robo Mario,RoboKusthi, and RoboCricket. Also their design thinking was assessed by a challenge called Design your Imagination. Also a jury composed of innovators, in a Q&A about their journey in RPL in the event “Elevator Pitch “. It was indeed a great championship rounds amongst the finalists showing lots of innovation, skills and adapting to challenges with their upgraded Robot. At the end of the fierce competition, RPL champions was a team called Oda Dragons (Oda is village name)having all students from government school.
Parallel to RPL final rounds, many other students from various schools and villages, have demonstrated their innovation to the visitors. One local innovator also came with a paramotor (motorized paraglider). It was quite an attraction to all the visitors. Also a special carnival, Robo Carnival was organized for young kids to just give them exposure with fun about the Robotics world.
Follow-up Workshops:Prizes to the zonal and championship rounds were given in the form of Technical Kits of 3 different levels (Arduino, Sensors & Communications). All winners and other teams were given the opportunity to attend a weekend workshop on the three kits and its application. All active WhatsApp accounts of the RPL teams and one common WhatsApp group of CaptionNCoach are still engaged by the organizers to help them learn new things and get to know about other such contests across state and nation.
Possibilities of replicating & Scaling up:
It can be replicated by other organizations / academic institutions. However, before implementation to such a high number of villages, one needs to create rapport with the villages over a period of 2 to 3 years. We would like to share all our communication, norms, format, sources for things, etc., if someone would like to replicate it. Some of the details are already made available on our website: http://rpl.uniqyou.org/. It also required other collaborators to effectively execute RPL. A dedicated team of enthusiastic young team for at least four months for the successful intervention.
We would like to scale up next year 2020 with season 2 with some other interventions like Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality or some other technology. We feel that scaling up would be very challenging and we would need CSR finance support and Student internships from engineering colleges/polytechnics.
Impact:
For students and team:
360 students were directly involved and over 3000 students were indirectly benefited from RPL for Robotics. Total we were able to reach over 5000 students, parents, teachers etc. We believe that 80% of the teams were able to make their robot without direct intervention of the organizers. Rest of the teams needed some support to understand and problem solving at a certain stage. 60 to 70 % teams were able to engage each one of the team members in a productive manner and quality teamwork was felt in the Elevator Pitch – Q&A with the expert. It was noted that most of the teams were learning from their mistakes quickly, learning from other teams and were highly adaptive to the situation and challenges. Most of the team’s involvement for the RPL was profound and they indeed made it highly competitive.
For Support from Coach, Sarpanch and other fellow villagers
The intervention of a youthful Coach gave a lot of confidence, planning and technical know-how to the teams, especially to the second championship finals. Within the given RPL norms, more than 50% of the coaches gave the extra edge that the 11-15 year age group young team needed when they faced technical problems. Their role for team building was also notable.
We felt that we were not able to involve or assess the role of Sarpanch and other fellow villagers in RPL 2019. We have yet to test when we will have RPL 2020. We also need to find out ways to have their active involvement in future.
For Ecosystem
For future RPLs, we will be able to get very good responses and support from most of the villages (70-80%). We have to find ways to keep the contact alive with many other smaller interventions, where the teams will be able to find some more challenges to work on in a team. At the end of RPL 2019, we are sure that there is a good possibility to create a village level sustainable ecosystem to nurture the innovation spirit in young students. If a common platform of likeminded school children, college students, technicians, fabricators, Sarpanch and financial supporters is established in a village, there is a great future of grass root innovation from the village itself solving their own problems in their own way and wisdom.
On the Championships final day, students were inspired by acknowledging them that their level of participation was not less than degree engineering students. These remarks were given by Vice Chancellor of Gujarat Technological University (GTU) Dr Navin Sheth. GTU is the technical university which covers all degree, diploma engineering colleges, MBA, MCA and Pharmacy colleges of Gujarat.