The continuing pandemic has certainly shifted the perceptions of the world we had been knowledgeable about. It's compelled us to change the habits of ours, our way of life essentially. A significant shift to take place is in the EdTech area - classrooms went online all over the world as schools shuttered down and technology has never been a more adept enabler of education.

Even as early as 2015, when India was simply about seeing considerable traction in edtech, IIT Kanpur students  Dhrupal Shah and his batchmates Abhishek Sharma and Pankaj Varma realized the importance of technology in furthering the reach of education. This led the trio to operate on a project known as evive, which ended up becoming launched on the worldwide crowdsourcing platform Indiegogo and turning the first ever to be released by Indian university students on the platform. Following their graduation from IIT Kanpur in 2017, Shah and his friends improvised the product further to develop a digitized learning ecosystem, particularly for school-going children. The ages of 7 16 are highly receptive, along with it was a fantastic window for the trio to garner interest in emerging technologies as IoT, AI, and machine learning.

Hence, STEMpedia was created in 2018, providing a range of Do It Yourself project kits, graphical programming software, and programming tools that assist children between ages 7-16 make their own futuristic tech projects. Clearly, they cannot instruct them complicated codes as well as computer languages, but can actually show them what may be created by making use of these systems. This helps engage them in a format that’s best suited for their age, as well as improves their interest enough to want to pursue these technologies as they grow older – that’s the hope.

India, which has among the largest number of school-going students, falls quite far behind in harnessing technology to facilitate learning. less than 8 % of all the Indian school-going students have smart tabs, whereas, in the US, over 50 % of students own tabs and are actually tuned to electronic media for learning. But learning goes a step further than simply making use of tabs - STEMpedia's range of offerings makes the learning experience interactive as well as immersive for the students, without coming across as difficult to comprehend

That  AI is going to be an imperative component of learning modules is not a hidden truth. In reality, the recently announced National Education Policy has laid great emphasis on upskilling in technologies like AI. PictoBlox is actually a streamlined effort by STEMpedia to make the youth AI-ready. Via graphical programming, AI and ML are created interactive for children. It can help them understand computer vision, face recognition, speech recognition, optical character recognition, image-based ML, pose-based ML, and audio-based ML. Additionally, the providing also allows children to understand what neural networks are – which form the cornerstone of AI algorithms. . A comprehensive online course is designed to fill gaps in understanding these ideas. In the coming days, Shah plans to add Python programming for advanced people of PictoBlox.

PictoBlox alone has over 6,000 users since its launch in June 2020. General, STEMpedia has worked with over 100,000 students in forty countries. The COVID19 period has led to a 2x growth in demand for PictoBlox. kids are stuck at home and it's really tough to keep them entertained the whole day, particularly with working parents. This kind of setup not only distracts them but also facilitates learning.

The endeavor of developing learning modules that aim to instruct the fundamentals of advanced technologies additionally shines the spotlight on responsibility as well as ethics. The module designers are mindful of building course material that does not propagate bias, unlawful or unethical notions or ideas.