Srusthi Sandeep, a Bengaluru resident, one day noticed that many of the traffic lights in her city lacked the tool to assist visually challenged pedestrians. Lack of this accessibility feature, which makes a beeping noise to help blind pedestrians recognise stop and go lights, was even causing many accidents. Srusthi, a kind and compassionate person, set to address this challenge to help save the lives of blind pedestrians. She did that by creating an AI-powered smartphone tool for the blind pedestrians that can identify the presence of a vehicle on the road and notify them. 

Now, it may be natural for anyone to assume that Srusthi Sandeep is an ace coder from country’s IT hub. However, the truth is far from that. Srusthi, the mind behind the ‘Blind Person Support System’, is a 6th standard student at the Air Force School, Bengaluru. She learned all the skills required to make this tool from the Atal Innovation Mission’s ATL AI Base Module created for students from 6th to 12th standard, in collaboration with NASSCOM and was introduced in February this year.

Srusthi is not an outlier. Ghaziabad’s 8th grader Ripunjay Vashishthh who created an ‘Automatic Drip Sanitiser’, Delhi’s 9th grader Prateek Gupta who made the ‘Path Finder’, and Ferozepur’s 10th grader Mitali Kataria who built the ‘Staying Home vs Community Transmission of COVID 19’ are all the beneficiaries of the ATL AI Base Module along with two million students from 5100 Atal Tinkering Labs across the country.

And, on August 14th, at the eve of 74th Independence Day, Atal Innovation Mission and NASSCOM FutureSkills launched the AI Step-Up Module, which seeks to build on the success of the Base Module.

The AI-Base Module, which was well-received, was unique in many ways. The key drivers of this initiatives were NITI Aayog’s Atal Innovation Mission and NASSCOM FutureSkills. The Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) is a flagship initiative set up by the NITI Aayog to promote innovation and entrepreneurship across the length and breadth of the country, based on a detailed study and deliberations on innovation and entrepreneurial needs of India in the years ahead.

NASSCOM FutureSkills is an industry driven learning eco-system to get India accelerated on the journey to building skills and becoming the global hub for talent in emerging technologies. The programme aims to reskill 2 million professionals and potential employees and students in the industry over a period of 5 years.

The initiative also helped the students also with a five-part AI online video series on AIM YouTube channel, which has engaged more than 8.4K viewers in one month. Additionally, the 120+ AI high-quality proposals received for the Community Day Challenge is another testimony for the remarkable success this initiative has gained. 

“AI is getting integrated into every solution we see and has become a reality in today’s tech”, says R Ramanan, Mission Director of the Atal Innovation Mission at NITI Aayog. “This is the first-ever mass introduction of artificial intelligence module to school students between grade 6th and grade 12th, and that is an incredible game-changing educational initiative in our country, or even in many other countries in the world”, he added.

The conception of the ATL AI Module, which was divided into two parts, namely the AI Base Module and the Step-Up Module, was done with the objective of enabling students to leverage the full potential of their Atal Tinkering Lab. Students can innovate and create valuable solutions benefiting the society, all by themselves. The modules aim to help young students understand and accept AI while making it more accessible.

The Step-Up Module, the successor to the AI Base Module, picks up exactly from where it left and provides a medium to those youngsters who wish to expand their knowledge base after becoming familiar with the basics of the AI discipline through the Base Module. Any student with a zeal to learn and explore the field further can benefit from this new edition.  

The new module also fits perfectly with the vision shared by the New Education Policy (NEP), which seeks to align India’s curriculum to the 21st century and to prepare the students for the AI economy. NEP also stresses that school children should be exposed to crucial skills such as digital literacy, coding and computational thinking from a young age, through the teaching of contemporary subjects such as Artificial Intelligence and Design Thinking. 

“This is an imperative step to power the young minds of India. It ties in well with NEP2020 and will encourage learning and innovation at the grass-root level”, said Amitabh Kant, CEO of NITI Aayog, while launching the Step-Up Module.

The New Education Policy also aims to use education as a means to sensitise students to the issues and ethics surrounding AI. It recognises that holistic education of AI-based technologies can not be complete without raising awareness of issues such as data protection and privacy, and ethical concerns such as data bias. In line with this, the Step-Up Module also introduces students to the concept of Ethics in AI, through practical examples and checklist, which was done in collaboration with INDIAai.

 “ATL AI Step-Up Module has a number of real-life applications and cases that are built into it, and that’s what makes it very special. Hope the students enjoy it”, says NASSCOM President Debjani Ghosh. 

According to Amit Aggarwal, CEO of SSC NASSCOM, “The Step-Up AI Module is designed to equip our next generation of talent with basic AI skills and to make data fluency an integral part of their learning journey. I hope our students will make the most of this and gear up to play an instrumental role in the next wave of innovations and breakthroughs driven through AI in India.”

One of the core changes in the Step-Up Module, when compared to the Base Module, is the interactive nature of the module, as it contain numerous activities and experiments, making it a fun learning experience for the students.

“The approach is to provide practical experience in a variety of sub-fields and for students with varied abilities or interests. So different students can find relevance and flexibility of engagement”, says Yudhisther Yadav, Head of Strategic Initiatives, at NASSCOM FutureSkills and one of the key drivers of this initiative.

“The Step-Module continues on from the base module and builds on its success,” he added. 

One of the projects included has been done by a student who created this post engagement with the Base Module. The project called Bell-The- CAT (COVID19 And Travel) was created for managing urban mobility, and COVID spread using Data Science by Archit Narain, a 7th grader from Bengaluru. 

“To bell the CAT means to attempt or agree to attempt an impossibly difficult task of balancing mobility and infection spread, that if achieved, will benefit the entire community. This is my attempt,” says Archit.

The Step-Up Module is also notable for the collaborative effort that went into its creation between industry members, government bodies, and academia. This was facilitated by setting up a workgroup of industry members with the best of knowledge, expertise and experience in the field. 

“The constant discussions and interactions with the industry members and pedagogy experts on the matter enabled in giving direction and actually implementing the idea of module development. A major part of the process was the substantial research undertaken on various models and content released or currently deployed across various sectors”, points out Yudhisther.

The organisations participated includes NASSCOM, Amazon, Microsoft, Tech Mahindra, SAP, Accenture, IIT Bombay, Stempedia, Tevatron, GE, Microbit, ARM, WIPRO, BOSCH, NVIDIA and INDIAai.

“At its core, we believe that to create a country of highly-skilled workforce and innovators, the industry must step-up and introduce cutting-edge knowledge at a young age through the school education ecosystem”, says Ronak Jogeshwar of Atal Innovation Mission. 

“The time is propitious for us, as India’s youth is gearing up to become the manufacturing centre of the world,” he added. 

The AI Base Module and its follow up Step-Up Modules comes at the right time. The modules, which are open to the public for access, can become an essential foundation stone for the nation’s bigger goal of developing a robust AI-ready workforce for the future.