BalaSwecha - Bridging the digital divide

[SrujanaMehra]

Name of the Project: BalaSwecha

About the project:
BalaSwecha is a learning platform for school children from the underprivileged background, which provides them with virtual lab environment and multimedia content. This helps students explore their subjects better and even encourage them to explore beyond their textbooks. BalaSwecha is a tool which complements teachers but not replace teachers.

The main aim of this project is to bridge the growing digital divide at the school education level, clearly visible between schools for the underprivileged and corporate schools.

BalaSwecha as a learning platform is used by students and teachers where they interact with and learn through the applications. Subjects like physics, chemistry and mathematics, which are to be learnt by conducting experiments can be explored by using the applications present in BalaSwecha operating system.

Here is an article about the project: http://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/bridging-digital-divide-underprivileged-communities

Why work on this project?
Firstly, you will be working on the latest technologies like HTML5, CSS3 and Angular JS. In projects like BalaSwecha you are directly impacting the society. You can get the feedback from the kids who are using the application. It will be one amazing experience to see the glow on their face when they are using these applications made by you!

Product Development:
There has been a continuous effort into product development. The team is working on developing more educational applications, building a complete learning management tool and making BalaSwecha work on open hardware.

Technologies used for product development are HTML5, CSS3 and AngularJS.

Constraints:
The constraints for product development are, most of the schools are equipped with:
Low end hardware like 128 MB RAM
N Computing devices are the proprietary devices with expired licences for the Windows Operating Systems.

Implementation:

Conducting Teacher Training Workshops (TTW) helped in taking BalaSwecha forward. In our TTW Edition -1, there were around 180 teachers from 100 different Government schools across two states in India who have taken part.

TTW Edition – 2 mainly concentrated on training the Master Resource Persons (MRP). The idea is MRP will conduct classes to the Government school teachers in each district.

Read more at: http://swecha.org/content/teacher-training-workshop-ed-2

In summer of 2015, we will be conducting a workshop from teachers and also conduct a summer camp for the students for the first time.

Suitable for beginners?
Yes, both beginners and experienced can work on it easily.

What are issues/features students may work on?
Bug fixing
Converting a few existing applications to HTML
Multimedia content
Simulations for applications like Stellarium, celestia, STEP etc.
Creating Mock ups for new applications
New application development

Name and Contact of the Project Mentor: Naga Sujan Mehra - +91 9966010916

Technology mentor: Isha Tripathi (Application Developer, Bala Swecha Alumni) : “I personally have seen the gap between facilities and infrastructure available in government schools in India, it’s enough to discourage even the brightest of students from exploring further than what the textbooks give them. The teachers themselves do not have resources to help the students, if and when they want to. I see this is an excellent opportunity to help out”

Git Repo:
https://code.swecha.org/groups/balaswecha/

[lislis]

Hey @SrujanaMehra, thanks for your proposal! I have a few questions though.
First one is about licencing: Where do you display under which open source licence each project is run? And if you don't have an open source licence for each project yet, please add one as they're required for projects to participate in Rails Girls Summer of Code.
The seconds question is about the ssl certificate on your Gitlab page. It seems to be broken and the resulting warning in the browser might scare away people who want to take a look at the code. Do you plan on fixing that in the near future?

[SrujanaMehra]

Hi Lisa,

First one is about licencing: Where do you display under which open source

licence each project is run? And if you don't have an open source licence
for each project yet, please add one as they're required for projects to
participate in Rails Girls Summer of Code.

All the applications are under GPLv3. We will shortly put up the license
notice on the project page.

The seconds question is about the ssl certificate on you Gitlab page. It

seems to be broken and the resulting warning in the browser might scare
away people who want to take a look at the code. Do you plan on fixing that
in the near future?

We are renewing the SSL certificate, it should be up in next few days.

Thanks,

On Mon, Mar 9, 2015 at 9:33 PM, Lisa P notifications@github.com wrote:

Hey @SrujanaMehra https://github.com/SrujanaMehra, thanks for your
proposal! I have a few questions though.

First one is about licencing: Where do you display under which open source
licence each project is run? And if you don't have an open source licence
for each project yet, please add one as they're required for projects to
participate in Rails Girls Summer of Code.
The seconds question is about the ssl certificate on you Gitlab page. It
seems to be broken and the resulting warning in the browser might scare
away people who want to take a look at the code. Do you plan on fixing that
in the near future?

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#20 (comment)
.

Naga Srujana Mehra

Telephone+91 9966010916[image: ThoughtWorks]
http://www.thoughtworks.com/

[alicetragedy]

Hi @SrujanaMehra, we're happy to accept the project for this year's summer of code! Congrats 🎉
Please, if you have not done so yet, don't forget about the license and the SSL certificate. Thank you!

[alicetragedy]

@SrujanaMehra one more thing, before I forget – could you also give us a way to contact you by email? At some point we'd like to get in touch with all project mentors by email and will require an email address. Thank you!

[SrujanaMehra]

You can email me at nagamach@thoughtworks.com or
Mehra@swecha.net

Sent from my iPhone

On 27-Mar-2015, at 7:48 pm, Laura notifications@github.com wrote:

@SrujanaMehra one more thing, before I forget – could you also give us a way to contact you by email? At some point we'd like to get in touch with all project mentors by email and will require an email address. Thank you!

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[anjalyes]

@SrujanaMehra me and my partner are interested in working in this project. Is it still open?