The Higher Education Review

"It all started in 2008," recollects Prasoona Devalapally about her visit to a science fair in the USA where she met a group of young school students who displayed innovative Robotics projects. She was astonished by their clarity of thoughts, problem solving and collaborative skills, which were distinctly different from many other exhibits over there. That day, Prasoona returned home with several thoughts around how Robotics can be integrated into learning in an effective, challenging and engaging way to develop the right skills. By then, she had several years of experience with Early Childhood Development Centres both in the US and in India. "We started our Robotics education journey in 2009 inspired by the science fair experience and had our kids engage in several projects day in day out," recounts Prasoona, the first generation entrepreneur who founded TIX Robotics to promote STEM learning in India through Robotics.

TIX stands for Technology, Inno-

vation and Excellence, which are essential ingredients in whatever the TIX Robotics team do. Right from young learners of primary school to even engineering college students, the approach of TIX Robotics is similar. "The centre-piece of our teaching philosophy is LEARN to explore and EXPLORE to learn. We teach fundamental concepts in a simple, clear and concise way and encourage the students to explore with hands-on projects," says Prasoona. With self-paced flexible learning modules, TIX offers workshops ranging anywhere from a day to an entire academic year. Each module starts with simple projects to drive the working principle and concepts and then increasing complexity of projects challenge the students to apply the concepts learnt.

"With self-paced flexible learning modules, TIX offers workshops ranging anywhere from a day to an entire academic year."

"We relate all projects to the real world examples and subjects like Science and Mathematics. Our training curriculum is carefully designed to bring out the creativity and enhance problem-solving skills," claims Prasoona. "We continually test students' grasp of a concept with assignments, tasks and friendly competition among the rest of the class". All of the trainers of TIX are qualified graduate engineers from different streams with industrial exposure. In addition to that, they undergo an intensive technical training for several hund-

-red hours and prove their mettle before they actually start training the students. Prasoona adds, "We encourage our trainers to do research and come out with new projects when they are free from training.

"The hard work and commitment that Prasoona and her team have been putting for the students of TIX are evident in their recent achievements. Representing India, five teams trained by TIX made to Robofest World Championship competition in Detroit and Florida in the US in 2016 and 2017. TIX also has WRO Regional Championship winners who have represented Hyderabad in WRO Nationals in New Delhi. Prasoona proudly says, "Our team of students have won Robocup Regional Championship and FLL Regional Championship and represented our institute in nationals in Bangalore and Chennai respectively."

Alongside these achievements, TIX has trained children of government school as part of their endeavor to bring STEM learning to underprivileged and won trophies including by all girls team in FLL regional competition. "Our endeavor is to cover students from international schools to rural areas. We are collaborating with several organizations including a NGO working with United Nations for spreading the awareness about STEM and skill development of children from rural areas," concludes Prasoona.