At Nasscom’s Mini Maker Faire, whizkids made adults sit up and take note
Like every kid his age, Ananth, 12, was always at the receiving end of his dad’s well-meaning harangue: “Don’t slouch, sit straight.” But unlike many other kids, Ananth realised that his dad was right, and decided to spare him the trouble of having to alert him to his posture every time. Instead, he decided to build an app that would alert him whenever he slouched.
“Rather than my parents telling me, I thought there should be a device that reminds me when I am not sitting upright,” says Ananth, displaying his device, which he calls a “BackBelt” – a tablet device with a belt that one would strap onto his back. On the ‘BackBelt’, he has an app that he developed himself, which uses the device’s accelerometer to detect changes in posture and trigger the alert.
BackBelt vibrates when it detects an angle of deviation from the pre-set “straight back position,” Ananth explained to the crowd that gathered at his stall at the Nasscom Product Conclave’s Mini Maker Faire in Bengaluru recently, curious to know what the seventh grader had come up with.
Next to Ananth’s stall, 14-year-old twins Varun and Vrinda entertained another crowd. Varun holds a tab that controls a robot that he and his sister built. They call it ‘Deskpet’. Vrinda positioned a pen stand at a distance from the robot’s arm, and Varun taps a command on his tab to ‘Deskpet’. The robot moves forward on its wheels and grabs the pen stand.
“If you are sitting on your bed and are too lazy to get up and grab something fr-om the table, Deskpet can do it for you,” says Varun. Built using Lego blocks, and some help from their paren-ts to programme the device, Deskpet is Vrinda and Varun’s aid for small tasks for the physically challenged, or for the plain lazy.
The day-long Mini Maker Faire saw participants from all age groups. 10-year-old Sarah Joseph from Kerala animatedly explained her burglar alarm that captures a picture of a burglar and emails it to its owner. A few stalls away, Dinesh Anvekar, Dean at Alpha College of Engineering, displayed how simple machines can be built at home using easily available material.
Anvekar, who conducts workshops for schools and NGOs, said through the Faire, he wanted to reach out to children and their parents to encourage them to experiment and make things on their own.
Ninth-grader Harsh Kumar seemed to have the early makings of an entrepreneur with his project that used plastic waste to design fans that could convert wind energy into electric energy, enough to charge mobile phones. Harsh says when he visited a village in Madhya Pradesh with his family last year, he noticed his relatives’ house had fans running but no socket to plug phones in. That is when he thought of converting one energy form to another. Asked about the voltage capacity of his charging device, he said unlike regular 5-volt chargers that harm battery life, his is a 3.5-volt device. “I know that it charges slowly, but in the long run it won’t harm your phone’s battery,” the 14-year-old said. Ananth, Varun, Vrinda and Harsh attend a weekend workshop called Idealabs at the Visvesvaraya Industrial and Technological Museum where they are mentored to experiment in different fields of science.
