Panaji: While most people have heard about the initial physicist India Aryabhata but the name Venkatesh Bapar Ketkar, Bibha Chowdhuri and even contemporary scientists Tessy Thomas can draw blankly.
By remembering this, the trio of class IX students from Navy Children’s School, Dabolim, designed a digital quiz game to highlight Indian contributions to the field of science.
What they did not expect was to win the first place at Toycathon 2021 which had just been concluded where Prime Minister Narendra Modi interacted with the participants.
Toycathon 2021 is an inter-ministerial initiative organized by the Innovation Cell Ministry of Education Union with the support of all Indian Councils for Technical Education (AICTE) and other union ministries.
As part of ‘Aatmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan’ Modi marked Toycathon-2021 in January to the concept of toys and novel games based on Indian civilization, history, culture, mythology, and ethos.
“We started working around March.
There are two prototypes.
One is a website and the other is the application.
We decided to go with the application, which has a system and assessment level, while the website has just required users to enter and play,” said Maya Maya Yadav is 14 years old, the leader of the trio team.
Yadav, along with Krishang Joshi and Tanishq Bhatnagar, designed the game during the second covid-19 wave peak in Goa, using a call to coordinate their efforts.
The three of them, assisted by their chemistry teacher Neera Singh, taught themselves and plan to improve their application by making it visually attractive in the coming months.
“I watch a lot of YouTube videos to learn how to build a cellular application,” Joshi said.
“The game we made, made for the nine-year-old group.” Their efforts paid off when they were declared the winner of the Toycathon 2021 digital edition.
“Everyone knows about Einstein and Newton, but very few have heard of Venkatesh Bapkar Ketkar, CV Raman, Aryabhata, Shushruta or Tessy Thomas,” said Yadav.
Although boys are still in school, they know that the application development industry is a large market and that when India grows, there will be great growth in the field of online games, interactive websites, and social media serving Indian audiences.
They hope to make a sign for themselves.