CHENNAI: While hundreds of students from the country’s top technical institutions are ready for battle at Shaastra 2019, IIT Madras’s four-day technical fest, a group of school kids from Kerala are the ‘feared ones’.Students of Choice School in Kochi, who won the event last year, dominated Day 1 of the event on Thursday and expect to emerge the winners. Teachers from the private CBSE school attributed this to the dedicated innovation and design lab and integration of robotics into the main curriculum from Class III.At Choice School, among the 2,400 to have set up an Atal Tinkering Lab (ATL) in 2015, a ministry of human resource development initiative, students from Classes III to IX get to study robotics for one hour a week. The interested get to spend more time working on scientific themes of their choice. Staff, trained in streams of engineering like mechanical, electrical and electronics and robotics, train them on languages like Python and Arduino.Three years down the line, 50 students from this lab have participated in robotics competitions not only across the country but also in the US and China; many have made their own robots by spending up to 20,000.After an impressive performance at the recently-concluded tech fest in NIT Calicut and Road Rave, India, the school team is now at IIT-M.While most of the college students found the track setting and obstacles in the preliminary rounds at ‘RoboOceana’ on Thursday challenging, members of the Choice School team were seen clearing them with ease.The competition consists of an underwater challenge with turbines, canals and bridges as obstacles and a pick-and-place challenge along steeply inclined ramps. Asked how the young ones had managed to gain an edge over their college counterparts, Sunil Paul, a teacher, said they allowed the children to fail and learn from it. “They are taken to various local competitions before bringing them to IITs and NITs. But most college students, who participate in these events, are from the final year, don’t get a chance to correct their mistakes,” he said.Also, the quality of material used helped the team in managing 15/20 rounds compared to three or four that the others manage, he added.“We prefer lithium-polymer batteries and metal gear box over plastic gearbox setup and this gives the much needed reliability for such competitions.”Jacob Tony John, a Class IX student who recently designed a milkshake dispenser for the school canteen, said they found many college students not able to integrate the software with the hardware. “The credit should go to the teachers and school for training us on these lines from a young age,” he said.

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