Srinagar January 19:(KNS) 'Innovation in Science Pursuit for Inspired Research' commonly called INSPIRE is one of the flagship programmes of the Department of Science & Technology (DST), Government of India. The INSPIRE Awards - MANAK (Million Minds Augmenting National Aspirations and Knowledge), being executed by DST with National Innovation Foundation – India (NIF), an autonomous body of DST, aims to motivate students in studying in classes 6 to 10. The objective of the scheme is to target one million original ideas/innovations rooted in science and societal applications to foster a culture of creativity and innovative thinking among school children.
Under this scheme, schools nominate 05 best original ideas/innovations and a national jury then judges these innovations for originality, uniqueness of the idea, viability & creativity.
Two students from Delhi Public School Srinagar were awarded this year out of a total of 1125 INSPIRE awards given at national level. The students namely Anna Amin (Class 9th) & Nishit Kaul (Class 6th) have received a cash prize of Rs 10000 besides getting mentoring support from Department of Science & Technology, Govt. of India.
Nishit has made a prototype of an automatic irrigation system based on IoT sensors which continuously monitor humidity & other parameters of soil and intelligently irrigate it to maintain optimum water level.
Anna Amina has project is to convert acoustic energy produced by machinery in factories to electrical energy. The project describes the conversion of acoustic energy by introducing novel environment friendly energy converters: piezoelectric materials. This project considers piezoelectric effect for the conversion and then uses piezoelectric transformer to boost the output obtained due to direct piezoelectric effect.
Anna, while thanking her mentor, Shezan Fayaz, said, "I worked tirelessly for it & we searched every single garage in our area for the material used in the project." She also thanked her school and said, "My school was generous enough to facilitate & encourage me. My school let me use the physics land & other laboratories. My guides at school, Saleem Sir & Gurpreet maam also supported me in this project."
Nishit gave credit to his parents & school robotics lab. "During pandemic, when everyone was under lockdown, the school conducted online robotic & IoT workshops for children which inspired me to do something in agriculture", he said. He mentioned his teacher Mr Shafat for the guidance he provided in this project.
Commenting on the success of the students, Ehsaan Qudusi, CTO said "Our sincerest congratulations to the students. At the school, we have worked hard to incubate an atmosphere of scientific and progressive thinking. The INSPIRE fellowships bear our efforts out." Congratulating the students, Mr Vijay Dhar, Chairman DPS Srinagar said "The success of the students is a testimony to our efforts to transform and nurture the talent of students into socially relevant milestones. We are so proud of their success, and hope that it is just the start of a tradition of scientific excellence"(KNS)