AICTE-IDEA (Idea Development, Evaluation & Application) Labs are being established across the country for encouraging students for application of science, technology engineering and mathematics (STEM) fundamentals towards enhanced hands-on experience, learning by doing and even product visualization. As a common facility embedded in the institution, the IDEA Lab will make engineering graduates more imaginative and creative, besides getting basic training in the 21st century skills like- critical thinking, problem solving, design thinking, collaboration, communication, lifelong learning etc. IDEA Lab can empower the students and faculty to “engage, explore, experience, express and excel”, addressing the need of new age learning. IDEA Lab would serve as an infrastructure for faculty to take up and promote multidisciplinary education and research. Accordingly, faculty would be encouraged to get trained in these Labs and strive for creating problems/ projects/ internships in their own subjects/ disciplines and mentor the students.
IDEA Lab will provide all facilities under one roof, for conversion of an idea into a prototype. The idea need not be always be new (which will always be encouraged) but the emphasis would be on graduating engineers working with their hands using equipment, tools and consumables (listed in the Scheme Document). With these facilities available 24×7 in the campus, more students and faculty will be encouraged to take up creative work and in the process, get training on creative thinking, problem solving, collaboration etc. which conventional labs are not focussing on. The focus will be on training students so that they become imaginative and creative and stay so at the workplaces they join. The ultimate objective is to transform engineering education with such a Lab in all colleges and for this they must proactively expose all students to the IDEA Lab, organize training sessions for interested students as well as support projects and by providing online learning materials.
Besides agreeing to follow a Code of Conduct laid down by AICTE (given in Scheme Document), all IDEA Labs will be subject to monitoring and for this data on 15-20 parameters will have to be provided and uploaded on a weekly/ fortnightly/ monthly basis, as decided by AICTE. Points based on parameters will be added up to reflect the overall performance. The performance of all IDEA Labs will be reflected on a website maintained by AICTE. Also the composite score will appear on the Leaderboard on the website which will show the weekly standing and overall performance of each IDEA Lab. This would enhance the visibility of the institution among stakeholders and earn recognition from various quarters.
AICTE-IDEA Lab, GIMT-Guwahati
VISION
Activities to be held:
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With a view to fostering the creative potential of engineering students, the
Application) lab to boost new-age learning among students. “These
All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has selected 49
institutions to set up the IDEA (Idea Development, Evaluation &
Application) lab to boost new-age learning among students. “These
institutes were chosen based on their accreditation, technical
infrastructure, quality programmes and passionate faculty. Plans are on to
raise their numbers to 100 and later implement the scheme across all
colleges,” AICTE chairman Anil Sahasrabudhe tells
institutes were chosen based on their accreditation, technical
infrastructure, quality programmes and passionate faculty. Plans are on to
raise their numbers to 100 and later implement the scheme across all
colleges,” AICTE chairman Anil Sahasrabudhe tells
“The lab’s training will help the students devise protypes that would eventually become products since India is lacking in the
area of product manufacturing. While the government’s ATAL Tinkering labs in 2016 inculcated experiential learning in 10,000
schools, it was time for colleges to take on a similar mission. The IDEA labs were introduced as a natural extension of this
initiative, though their scope and capacity would be larger and more outcome-driven,” says Dhananjay Gadre, associate