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.
