About aakashlabs

We aim at developing useful Open Source applications and content for use on Aakash. These will encompass the entire educational spectrum from schools to colleges, and from vocational training to professional studies. Our goal is to complete useful development of engineering colleges, and to build a large community of thousands of these talented professional students and teachers, to carry out large scale development of applications and content for use in all schools and colleges. Content in Indian languages will receive special attention.

The Aakash Lab has been set up in the department of CSE (Computer Science and Engineering Department) at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, to drive this project. With the increasing convergence of communication and computing technologies, tablet computers are fast emerging as popular consumer devices. In coming years, Aakash is likely to become a ubiquitous tool in the hands of students, at all levels of their education.

Aakash Lab aims at developing useful Open Source applications and content for use on Aakash Tablet. These will encompass the entire educational spectrum from schools to colleges and from vocational training to professional studies. The goal is to complete the deployment at over 500 engineering colleges, and to build a large community of thousands of talented professional students and teachers from these colleges, to carry out large scale development of applications and content for use in all schools and colleges.

Building upon the past work at IIT Bombay, the team made substantial progress, and the work continues in full swing. It has added key functionalities through these applications.

• Students can now use video lectures (proxyMITY) in an interactive fashion. They can access these from a local server using W-Fi.
• They can give on-line Quizzes (Clicker) in the class and can submit assignments.
• They can conduct experiments and develop systems for Engineering control applications.

Most importantly, the institute has succeeded in making available a programming environment, permitting students to write and run programs in C, C++, Python and Scilab. The open source package 'Scilab' has been successfully ported on Aakash. This effort emphasizes that Aakash is not just an access device anymore, but can be used also a regular computer for learning programming.

Our team at Aakash Labs has been involved in activities ranging from :

• Design and development of android based software applications to enhance learning experience of students.
• Conducting training workshop on Android Application programming for students at various remote centres.
• Creating educational 3D animation content as per the requirement of teachers and porting it on the tablet.
• Digitization of school textbooks with interactive content; and teachers and students training for using Aakash in schools.
• Conducting Android Application Development contests among remote centres to promote development of educational android applications.

Also, students from various remote centres across the country have contributed in developing Applications for Aakash. All their work can be tracked down at Projects from students across remote centres.