IIT Madras hosts ‘Techno Central’ intelligence, creativity contests for 2,500 kids

NEW DELHI: The Indian Institute of Technology Madras Research Park (IITMRP) hosted ‘Techno Central’ in which six gamified learning competitions were held for children. The event was collaborated by India’s top-rated gamified EdTech platforms including HackerKID, DIYA labs, and Time2Chess.

The collaboration was aimed to encourage kids to learn and gain essential skills such as problem-solving, cognitive thinking, creativity and innovation through online coding games, making robotic projects, and chess.

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More than 2,500 kids registered for these six competitions which included a python coding competition, robotics contests, a chess competition, a quiz competition, and poster making contest besides a speech contest.

Kids between the ages of seven to seventeen took part in these contests. Over 100 children received gifts and prizes for winning and leading ahead of other kids in the competitions with a competing spirit.

The schools with the maximum number of winning students have been awarded trophies for being supportive of kids in learning through games and co-curricular activities.

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Dr Ashok Jhunjhunwala, President, IIT Madras Research Park and IIT Madras Incubation Cell inaugurated the contest in the presence of Sunil Sethia, Executive Director of BNI Chennai. The prizes were distributed by guests of honour Dr Kalaiselvan T, Former-Additional Director of CUIC-Anna University, Rajalakshmi Srinivasan, Director of Product Management at ZOHO Corp and Chitti Babu, Chief Innovation Officer, Star Insurance.

Witnessing the energy among kids in the event, Dr Ashok Jhunjhunwala, President, IIT Madras Research Park and IIT Madras Incubation Cell, said, “I can see that children present here wanting to play coding challenges, make robot projects, win over chess or enjoy any such activities that are meant for them.The biggest part of GUVI that attracted me was they understood that programming and language were two different things. GUVI brought out coding classes in vernacular Indian languages and they teach programming in these languages.”

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The python coding contest aims to inspire and educate the next generation with programming skills that further develop problem-solving and cognitive thinking through interactive coding games through programming and its algorithmic approach.

HackerKID website has been successful in executing the coding contest among kids with its interactive coding games like Turtle, Zombieland, Webkata trilogy and Coding pirate, which focused on web development concepts with HTML, CSS, Python JavaScript and basic coding with an algorithmic approach. Existing users of HackerKID were ranked on its leaderboard for their active gaming and learning on the HackerKID platform. These top kids were also awarded exciting prizes.

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Complementing the Techno Central events, Praveen Kumar, Head of Business Unit, HackerKID, said, “Computer Science is a subject unlike any other subject, it needs a lot of practice to better understand its concepts. HackerKID site aims to deliver this for school kids in a gamified approach. We have managed to keep the subscription of the product very affordable so that Tier 2 and Tier 3 students also benefit from this.”