Sunita's makerspace – All you need is space
Sunita’s Makerspace appreciates innovation, creativity and collaboration as they are three of the most important skills for the 21st century. For the young creators and innovators, Maker’s Day was organized under four categories: Innovation, Creativity, Social and Synergy to — create awareness about environment. Each of the four major categories —Creativity, Innovation, Social and Synergy— were further subdivided into three levels: Advanced, Intermediate and Basic. In this Mega event all learners from Pal, Utran, Katargam, Sachin, Laxmi Vidyapeeth participated actively.
The four categories put to test the various aspects of a learner’s development. Creativity was all about finding the extraordinary in the ordinary, be it in the realm of thoughts, public speaking, finding use for refuse or weaving a word web. Innovation had learners come up with environment friendly devices and gadgets that may offer solutions to some burning issues. Under the category called Social, learners showed their concern for the society by creating games that can complement knowledge gathered from books. And under Synergy, learners were busy creating businesses that sustain development by making them more environment friendly.
Innovation –
This competition too had three different categories — Advanced, intermediate and basic. Learners had sessions on ethical hacking, which has gained parlance due to increased threat to privacy and increased vulnerability in banking and finance resulting from Internet dependence. Other two areas were automobile engineering and android application development.
Creativity –
This category had the most participation as the number of categories was also high. Under Creativity, competitions were held under the heads Funk from Junk, Self-written Poetry Recitation, Battle of Bands and Drama. Under Funk from Junk, learners created works of art from refuse and throwaway things. Discarded newspapers, nuts and bolts, screws, wood shavings and blocks became exquisite works of art in the young furnaces of their minds.
Social –
To develop a sense of belonging in learners, another category in the Maker’s Day events was the Social category in which learners created educational games that can be used to help learners acquire concepts effortlessly. While making the games learners were sensitised to the needs of a few who cannot learn the traditional way. The competition was held at the Intermediate level.
Synergy –
Learners of the school at the advanced level did case studies and sought solutions to environmental problems. One of the cases studied was the use of pesticides in Coca Cola. It was a study of human greed which bulldozes over all emotions and human values. Under Synergy in the expert level, learners spent five days at Laxmi Vidyapeeth at Sarigam setting up a business from the ground up. The learners got an exposure of a lifetime by going through all the processes involved in setting up a business to selling products in the market. The discussion brought into focus the need for a balance between profit and social responsibility, which was the point of the exercise.