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.

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 :

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.