A news article in the Matrubhumi newspaper of July 4 th 2016 discussed the proposed expansion of SPACE’s Insight project, which is now confined to Thiruvananthapuram district, to the rest of Kerala. Insight, presently supported by the Department of Social Justice, has crossed many hurdles and uncertainties to reach its sixth year of functioning.
The 55 web applications developed by SPACE assist differently abled children in improving their vocabulary, daily routine, personal hygiene, comprehension, emotions and reasoning as well as develop academic skills in areas such as arithmetic and grammar. The education apps cover the following areas under nine different headings: English, Malayalam, Maths, Science, Social Sciences, Reasoning, DLS, Feelings and Social Stories.
Christened with the indigenous name Lekha (meaning “writing”), and developed with funding from ICFOSS, Lekha OCR is a Malayalam Optical Character Recognizer (OCR) developed by SPACE. This software converts scanned images of Malayalam text into editable format.
As part of the Adivasi Youth Skill Development Program, ICT training was given to about 40 Adivasi youth in the age group of 15-25 years, from June 2015 onwards. The more backward Paniya community among the Adivasis were mostly included in the program.
With the support of Centre for Disability Studies (CeDS), SPACE is involved in the localisation of educational tools for differently abled children for the Insight project. As part of this, GCompris, a set of educational tools has been translated from English to Malayalam and its content localised and made more relevant – for example, by changing the names of some animals, food items, currency (dollars to rupees) etc.
From March 21-23, 2016, System Admin training was conducted for the lab staff of all engineering departments of Idukki Engineering College, which was inaugurated by the Principal. Though initially there were about 30 staff participating, this strength dwindled to 5 or 6 attendees in the subsequent days. The training covered installation, command line, customization, package installation and server management. An important part of the training was guiding them on how to migrate from Windows network to Linux.
Women traditionally face disadvantages in accessing and benefitting from technology, and this is doubly true for women living in rural areas. In March 2016, four women hackathons were conducted at four engineering colleges in various parts of the state, with a focus on rural, far-flung areas. These hackathons included OS installation, PHP Programming, and Database management. More than 50 women students participated, and some of them went on to become trainers for Women Hackathons.
From February 25th to March 3rd 2016, an e-content development program was conducted at Teachers Training College, in which 30 participants were trained in the development and editing of multimedia content. They were taught to use image, audio and video editing tools (Gimp, Audacity and Kdenlive respectively), after which participants created their own video.
On 28th January 2016, the Department of Education and SPACE inaugurated an IT workshop for 30 research scholars, who were provided training in using free software, the Internet and ICT. On 30th January, free software tools for teachers were covered. A session on Liberating Knowledge for Liberating Learning was conducted on 3rd February, which included tools for researchers.
