IIT Gandhinagar come up with Maker Bhavan to accelerate active learning

The Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (IITGN) inaugurated Maker Bhavan, a multidimensional academic makerspace to nurture innovative thinking and hands-on learning among students, to take forward the active and project-based learning approach in line with global educational institutions.

Hemant Kanakia, the founder of the Maker Bhavan Foundation, a California-based charity and the leading supporter of the creation of this makerspace at the Institute, inaugurated the makerspace in the presence of Damayanti Bhattacharya, the CEO of Maker Bhavan Foundation; Parimal Karani, a businessman; and Amit Prashant, the director of IIT Gandhinagar.

Maker Bhavan is envisioned to be a catalyst for transforming pedagogic practices and ensuring that active learning, creativity, and innovation become an integral part of teaching and learning at IIT Gandhinagar. It is designed on the lines of MIT and Caltech, with teamwork areas, a creative studio, and a variety of digital manufacturing equipment and electronics labs to motivate students to convert their ideas into real prototypes. It aims to turn students into doers, leaders and innovators.

The facility is aimed at benefitting students, faculty, alumni and industry partners of IIT Gandhinagar and, in the long term, educational practitioners from other institutions around the country with its state-of-the-art makerspaces, novel curricular and co-curricular programmes, significant industry engagement, internship opportunities, lecture series, conferences, hands-on workshops and more.

Sharing his thoughts about tbe inspiration behind the makerspace, Kanakia said, “I wish I had a different kind of education at IIT when I was studying because real-world engineering is very different and much more multi-disciplinary than classroom studies. There is no one answer to a problem and so a lot of re-learning has to be done to become a successful engineer.”

“We have created this Maker Bhavan to emphasise that learning can be done better by doing. The experience of actually making something makes students very confident in tackling the challenges in a very different way and that is the importance of the world of making. We want students to be inventive and develop an attitude for creative thinking. It’s been a great partnership with IIT Gandhinagar and we hope to do many more things together in years to come,” he said.

Prashant thanked Maker Bhavan Foundation for giving impetus to this idea and for being an active force behind building a world-class makerspace at IIT Gandhinagar that promotes active learning, creativity, and research innovation at various levels. “We are sure that the kind of teaching and learning experience and interdisciplinary interactions our students will get here will empower them with real-world problem-solving skills,” he said.

Shreyas Agarwal, one of the students participating in the CNC course at Maker Bhavan, IIT Gandhinagar, said, “The sheer amount of learning that we get is wonderful because we get the motivation to think beyond the casual approach of doing things and also learn about budgeting for the project. Using sophisticated equipment here provides us with a great learning opportunity to solve our project problems.”