COMMUNITY
Building robotics ecosystem in India
Over the years, I have geared my FRC team’s work towards growing the robotics community in India. We have taken multiple initiatives to do so. These are the ones in which I played a key role:
Build FIRST India: Starting and mentoring 25+ (FIRST Tech Challenge) FTC teams. Mentored 12 teams myself, 8 low-income and 1 all-girls.
Robotics Deconstructed: Technical mentoring course for CAD, Java, WPI Library.
Rookie Team Saturdays: Special mentoring sessions for rookie teams on non-technical topics.
FTC Resource creation: Translated competition training manuals to Hindi; Created website with competition resources and videos
FTC Scrimmage: Organized India’s first-ever mock FTC-style competition, where ~15 teams participated
STEM Teacher: MIT App Inventor course for hearing-impaired. All-girls coding and robotics workshops.
Advocacy: Presented to heads of 30+ Indian schools advocating for STEM & robotics education in the curriculum. Organized robotics stalls at school fete, shopping malls (Grover’s Mall) & arts/science fairs (VJTI Technovanza, IIT Techfest, Kala Ghoda)
Sponsorship: Conducted fundraising campaigns to support underprivileged teams and regional FIRST competitions, raising $70,000+.
A Laptop Story: Donated 100+ second-hand laptops during the pandemic and taught underprivileged students how to use them.
My Pen My Friend
Driven by newfound skills in web design and development, I launched My Pen My Friend in 2020.
In an era dominated by short-form communication, I saw students losing the skill of long-form writing, key to communicating in higher education and the workplace. My Pen My Friend encourages writing by giving students a platform to have their own articles, poems and stories published online. Seeing their work published gives students confidence in their writing and encourages them to write more.
We also host writing competitions to drive active thinking on important issues and give India’s youth a voice. Topics for such competitions include: wars, mental health, women, nature, etc. To bring My Pen My Friend to a larger group of students, I partnered with numerous English teachers, schools, NGOs and more.
To date, the platform has grown to over 400+ student writers from 75+ schools, who have had 1,500+ articles published.
SpecsAid: spectacles donation drives
Along with a friend, I have been running spectacles donation drives across Mumbai under the brand of SpecsAid. The aim is to provide spectacles to those who are unable to afford them.
We have conducted 70+ drives, typically in apartment buildings, resulting in us collecting 3,000+ spectacles from across Mumbai. It was challenging for us to grade and distribute spectacles ourselves, so we work with eye hospitals to create a streamlined distribution system. We also had to raise awareness amongst donors to not give spectacles that are damaged!
Organising such large-scale drives has required coordination with transport, building managers, hospitals and spectacles donators. We managed to scale by creating a team of volunteers that handles individual drives as well.
SpecsAid was covered by Mumbai Mirror, a local newspaper, and RedFM radio!
Math curriculum development
During the COVID-19 lockdown, I assisted my mother’s NGO, Angel Xpress Foundation, by creating a math curriculum hosted on YouTube for underprivileged students. AXF has 31 centers across Mumbai with 3,000+ students.
I also encouraged my friends to help out with other grade levels and subjects. We were able to create a comprehensive curriculum of 268 videos, posting all of them on the AXF Online YouTube channel. The videos were used as online lessons for students for 2 years during the pandemic when physical classes were not possible.