ISTE Workshop on Aakash for Education' Team Assignment Date posted: Submission due on or before:: Thursday, 6th December

2012 Wednesday, 9th January 2013

The file, 2012_12_06_Aakash_team_assignment_and_fellowship.pdf, has been uploaded on the workshop Moodle. Assignment: In the workshop we introduced the Aakash tablet, and briefly saw the demonstration of some useful applications and content developed at IIT Bombay, for Aakash -2. We now have a preliminary idea on how Aakash can be deployed for our educational activities. In coming months and years, a lot more work will be done by all of us together, to make Aakash more effective in education. This assignment requires each team to first think, imagine, and envision different aspects of such work which can enhance quality of education using Aakash. These thoughts should be documented and summarized in a section by the team. The team should then take one or more of these ideas, and formulate specific projects/activities, giving some details about how such projects could be implemented. These details should be reported in a separate section.

Your reflections and ideas, as well as your detailed project proposal, need not be limited to engineering education. You are free to and in fact, encouraged to -think about deploying Aakash in any part of the full spectrum of education, ranging from primary school, high school, colleges, to professional studies. You may wish to include vocational education and adult literacy as well. The only expectation is that, one should be able to carry out the main components of the suggested project in our engineering colleges, with the collaboration and assistance of others outside the engineering education system, if required. For example, to implement a project idea for primary schools, one may need assistance from primary school teachers, local school board, NCERT, etc..

The team assignment submitted by you will be released in open source. It will also be eligible for 'Aakash Research Fellowship' awards, described in the annexure attached to this document. Report Submission: Your assignment report should consist of four sections. Section 1 will be limited to one page (the first page). It should contain the RC code, name of your Institution, city, and state. You should then give a title to your report. It may be indicative of the specific proposal(s) you have elaborated in the report.

Enrollment number and names of all team members should then be listed. The first name should be that of the team leader. Against each name, provide an approximate number of person-hours spent in the assignment activity, with total effort spent by the team given at the end of the list. Finally, a set of keywords or key-phrases should be listed which best describe the nature of your proposal. An illustrative list of such key-phrases is given below, only as possible examples: (1) Primary education, Tamil script rendering, teaching history. (2) High School education, science tutorial, Hindi. (3) Civil engineering education, finite-element analysis, Scilab. (4) Linux port, memory optimization. (5) Wi-Fi access, concurrent users. (6) Solar charging, battery optimization. (7) Pedagogy, learning enhancement. Names of the team members must not occur anywhere else in the report. Section 2 should contain your general reflections on the possible use of Aakash in education. This reflection section is expected to present an argument -with rationale and justification - for an approach or perspective on deploying affordable Aakash tablets in our educational system. Section 3 should contain a detailed plan of possible work on any one task, chosen from the set of activities on which you have reflected in the first section. If you wish, you may choose to detail more than one task. You may expand on the use of Aakash in a class room; you may describe a specific R&D project to be done by students or even by senior researchers on a specific topic, or for improving Aakash and/or its usage; you may dwell upon the issues of educational pedagogy; you may wish to work out details of the infrastructure needed to deploy Aakash tablets in a school or college; or you may elaborate on any novel idea(s) you have, which have probably not yet been thought out by anybody else.

You should also try to work out an estimate of effort, time, and expenditure needed to implement the proposed project idea. These estimates should be included in a separate paragraph. Section 4 (optional) It should mention brief observations about possible future work, beyond the suggested project work. Appendices If there are any references cited in the text of your report, full details about them should be given in one appendix. Further appendices may be added, if necessary.

Format of the Submission file The assignement is to be prepared in a file which in an editable format (such as .odt, .doc, or .txt), and should be uploaded on the workshop Moodle by the team leader, on or before the due date. There should be only one submission per team. If your team uses Microsoft Office, please do not save the your file in the .docx format. Please use the older .doc format. This is because at IIT Bombay, we have very limited licenses of the newer Microsoft Office.

Important Notes:

1. As mentioned in the workshop announcement, ISTE certificates will be given only to those participants who have attended the workshop, submitted on-line feedback, and complete this team assignment. 2. Since substantial funding is proposed for selected entries,

(a) All participants must agree to participate and contribute to the peer review process, which will be detailed after the submissions are received. This will entail an additional work of about 4 to 6 hours in the weeks following the submission date. (b) Participants who qualify to get the Aakash fellowship award, must also agree to spend the amount only for professional activities, and to account for the expenditure as per the standard accounting/auditing procedure. Participating teams not willing to agree to the above, are required to explicitly state their inability to comply, on the first page of their report. Such submissions will, of course, qualify for the ISTE certification; but will not be considered for the Aakash fellowship awards.

3. Like all academic institutes in the world, IIT Bombay considers plagiarism of any kind to be a very unethical activity. Since all your submissions will be released in public domain, it is absolutely important that the report should contain your own expression of thoughts. If you feel the need to refer to someone else's work, appropriate citation must be included in the text, and the corresponding reference must be provided at the end of section 4, in a separate list of references. Noncompliance with the above, will immediately disqualify the submission, and the matter will be reported to concerned authorities.

(Dr Deepak B Phatak) 6 December 2012 In-Charge, Aakash project

th

ANNEXURE Aakash Research Fellowships to be awarded by IIT Bombay to selected participants of the workshop on 'Aakash for Education'
General: 1 We, from Aakash project at IIT Bombay, are glad to announce the 'Aakash Workshop Fellowships'. These Fellowships will be given to the members of faculty teams, whose workshops assignments are adjudged as the best, amongst submissions made by participating teams. These submissions will be ranked on the basis of innovative ideas, detailing of the proposed projects, and the quality of the report. Evaluation of the submitted entries will be done through a peer-review process which will be described in detail, after assignments are submitted. Members of all the participating teams will be required to contribute to this peer-evaluation process, as directed by IIT Bombay. 2 The evaluation will be done in two stages. In the first stage, the top two teams will be identified at each Aakash Project Centre. These two winning entries from each centre, will then be assessed to determine the best 50 entries across the country, amongst all participating Aakash Centres. 3 The team which is declared as the best entry in each center, will be awarded the Aakash fellowship. In case there are more than 15 teams from a centre, then each of the top two entries will be awarded the fellowships. 4 The value for each fellowship, is Rs. 15,000 for each member of the winning team. Thus, if a team has 3, 4, or 5 members, the corresponding fellowship amount for the winning teams, will be Rs. 45,000, Rs. 60,000, or Rs. 75,000 respectively. 5 The Institutions to which the top 50 teams belong, will get a special 'Institutional Aakash Research Grant' of Rs 1,00,000. This is in addition to the research funding of similar amount being provided to each Aakash Center, for setting up the basic infrastructure for use with Aakash tablets. 6 The fellowship amount for winning team(s) at each Center, will be given to the Institute, and Head of the Institution, or a person designated by the head, will be in charge of disbursement to the individual faculty members of the winning team(s). 7 Norms for using the fellowship are given in the next section.

Use of fellowship grant: 1. The fellowship amount awarded to teams, is to be spent by each individual member of that team for any professional activity as desired by him or her. Some suggestions are given below: (i) Many faculty members wish to attend national conferences on subjects in their fields. Getting financial support for conference fees, travel, and stay, is often difficult for a faculty member to arrange, even if a paper written by him or her is accepted in the conference. Without a submitted paper, it is nearly impossible to get financial support, even though attending a specific conference may significantly add to one's professional knowledge. It is suggested that the fellowships be used for such funding support, for attending a conference of the choice of the faculty member. In case a faculty member chooses this option, it is expected that the faculty members discusses the Aakash project with other attendees of the conference, briefly describing our activities. (ii) The fellowship can be used for purchasing professional books, or for subscribing to research journals. (iii) The fellowship amount can be used for supporting other academic and research activities of the faculty member, or the activities of any student(s) being guided by him/her. Thus, purchase of equipment, consumables, accessories, etc., can be supported from the fellowship grant. 1 The above are only suggestions. The decision of the faculty member will be final in the choice of these or any other professional activities chosen by the faculty member. The only expectation of the project is that, through the professional activities chosen to be undertaken, the faculty member will try to promote the cause of using affordable tablets for effective education. 2 It is reiterated that the fellowship amount can only be spent for professional activities, and will be required to be accounted for, strictly through the accounting procedure applicable within the Institute, as per Government of India norms. Request for releasing an advance when required, such as for paying registration fees for a conference, or for booking travel tickets, etc., can be made to the Institutes; but such advances must be settled within prescribed time limits.

(Dr Deepak B Phatak) Aakash project, IIT Bombay

6th December 2012 In-charge,