‘Gram Vikas Residential School’ Selected For ‘Atal Tinkering Lab’ by Niti Aayog
Bhubaneswar: Gram Vikas Residential School, a School based in Kankia village under Ganjam district of Odisha has been selected for the ‘Atal Tinkering Lab’ under the ‘Atal Innovation Mission’ of Niti Aayog, Government of India. The application for the said selection process had begun on July 15, 2017 and the list of selected Schools in ‘ATL Round 2’ had been issued on Niti Aayog’s official website.
A total number of 13,244 Schools had submitted applications from all across Country to be considered and selected for the ‘Atal Tinkering Lab’, out of which 1500 Schools were finally selected, in ‘ATL Round 2’ selection process, the result of which had been declared on December 25, 2017, a date dedicated to the birthday of former Prime Minister of India, Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
From Odisha, a total number of 720 Schools had submitted online applications before Niti Aayog, out of which 90 Schools have finally been selected. In Ganjam district alone, three Schools have been selected for the purpose. ‘Gram Vikas Residential School’ too falls under the same district. The selection process to be considered for the ‘Atal Tinkering Lab’ consists of three stages i.e. data cleaning, screening and evaluation. For this purpose specifically, a committee gets constituted, named ‘Screening and Selection Committee’.
The ‘Gram Vikas Residential’ School has more than five hundred students studying in it that primarily consists of children from the tribal communities of the State. Under the scheme, the School has been granted a fund of Rs.20 lacs for a period of five years and an initial allocation of Rs.12 lacs has already been made for the purpose. With the help of this money allocated by the Niti Aayog, our School shall establish an ‘Atal Tinkering Lab’ that shall foster curiosity, creativity and imagination in young minds; and inculcate skills such as design mind-set, computational thinking, adaptive learning, physical computing etc.
This is a great achievement for our School in particular as it shall enable the students from the most marginalized sections of the society, including the students from the tribal communities, who are mostly first generation learners to not just understand the concepts of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) in the Classrooms but to feel and experience it bythemselves. There is a popular proverb that what eyes can’t see, the mind cannot believe. This is true for
learning the concepts of ‘STEM’ as well. The establishment of an ‘Atal Tinkering Lab’ in our School shall make its learning easy for our Students and invigorate them to be of scientific temperament and investigating mind-sets.