Kerala has become the first state in the country to make robotics education mandatory for tenth grade students.

From the new academic year, over 4.3 lakh students across the State will get a revamped ICT (Information and Communication Technology) curriculum with a chapter on “The World of Robots” which will equip them with skills to design circuits, use sensors and actuators, and control electronic devices through computer programming.

The initiative is being facilitated by Kerala Infrastructure and Technology for Education (KITE) after Artificial Intelligence (AI) learning was introduced to seventh-grade students in the previous academic year. AI learning has also been incorporated into the new ICT textbooks for Classes VIII, IX and X this year. In addition, 29,000 robotic kits have been distributed to high schools across the state. 

Each kit includes components like Arduino breadboards, IR sensors, servo motors and jumper wires. Students will begin by building an automatic hand sanitiser dispenser that detects hand movement, and progress to creating AI-powered smart doors that recognise faces using the Face Detection Built-in Model within the Pictoblocks software. The new robotics learning approach aims at assisting students in solving practical problems.

KITE will arrange robotics training for teachers and also provide robotics kits to unaided schools which follow the state syllabus. The first phase of training is already complete for 9,924 teachers on the new tenth-grade ICT textbook. The ICT textbook will be available in Malayalam, English, Tamil and Kannada. 

Read about the University of Edinburgh’s AI partnership with Kerala.