IIT Gandhinagar inaugurates ‘Maker Bhavan’ – a state-of-the-art academic makerspace to accelerate active learning

Gandhinagar: Taking forward the active and project-based learning approach in line with global educational institutions, the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (IITGN) inaugurated Maker Bhavan today – a multidimensional academic makerspace to nurture innovative thinking and hands-on learning among students. Dr Hemant Kanakia, Founder of the Maker Bhavan Foundation (a california-based charity) and the leading supporter for the creation of this makerspace at the Institute, inaugurated the makerspace in the presence of Ms Damayanti Bhattacharya, CEO, Maker Bhavan Foundation, Mr Parimal Karani, Businessman and a long-time well-wisher of IITGN, and Prof Amit Prashant, Director, IITGN.

Maker Bhavan is envisaged to be a catalyst for transforming pedagogic practices and ensuring that active learning, creativity, and innovation become an integral part of teaching and learning at IITGN. It is a world-class makerspace designed on the lines of MIT and Caltech, with teamwork areas, a creative studio, and a variety of digital manufacturing equipment and electronics labs to motivate students to convert their ideas into real prototypes. It aims to turn students into doers, leaders and innovators. The facility will prove to be highly beneficial for students, faculty, alumni, industry partners of IITGN, and in the long-term, educational practitioners from other institutions around the country with its state-of-the-art makerspaces, novel curricular and co-curricular programmes, significant industry engagement, internship opportunities, lecture series, conferences, hands-on workshops, and so on.

Sharing his thoughts about seeds that inspired Maker Bhavan Foundation to build such a makerspace at IITGN, Dr Hemant Kanakia said, “I wish I had a different kind of education at IIT when I was studying because real-world engineering is very different and multi-disciplinary than classroom studies. There is no one answer to a problem, and so a lot of re-learning has to be done to become a successful engineer. We have created this Maker Bhavan to emphasise that learning can be done better by doing. The experience of actually making something makes students very confident in tackling the challenges in a very different way, and that is the importance of the world of making. We want students to be inventive and develop an attitude for creative thinking. It’s been a great partnership with IITGN, and we hope to do many more things together in years to come.”

Speaking on the occasion, Prof Amit Prashant said, “We are thankful to the Maker Bhavan Foundation for giving impetus to this idea and for being an active force behind building this world-class makerspace at IITGN that promotes active learning, creativity, and research innovation at various levels. We are sure that the kind of teaching and learning experience and interdisciplinary interactions our students will get here will empower them with real-world problem-solving skills.”

Sharing his experience Shreyas Agarwal, one of the students participating in the CNC course run at Maker Bhavan, IITGN, said, “The sheer amount of learning that we get at this space is wonderful because we get the motivation to think beyond the casual approach of doing things and also learn about budgeting for the project. Using sophisticated equipment here provides us with a great learning opportunity to solve our project problems.”