On May 5, the Mumbai-based Colgate Palmolive (India) Ltd – India’s largest dental care products company — launched a two-months scholarship offer to help children take small yet meaningful steps towards fulfilling their dreams. The company has partnered with the Bangalore-based Think and Learn Pvt. Ltd, which owns well-known K-12 learning app BYJU’s, to provide customised audio lectures which will enable children without Internet/smart devices to learn the BYJU way.

The audio lectures have been specifically designed for the Colgate Scholarship Offer 2017 and are available in English on a toll-free number until end September. Children can avail free-of-charge maths and science lectures for classes I-XII. “These lectures have already been used by approximately 250,000 children thus far. The partnership with BYJU’s has enabled Colgate to provide an interesting, enjoyable and effective learning experience to children of all backgrounds countrywide,” says a Colgate spokesperson.

 

Nasscom-IFIM training partnership

The Bangalore-based IFIM Business School has signed (July 13) a partnership agreement with Nasscom under which IFIM is Nasscom’s first licensed training partner (LTP) in Karnataka. Under the agreement, the B-school will offer associate analytics, junior data associate and associate recruitment study programmes to graduate students to enhance their employability skills primarily for the IT/ITES industries. IFIM will teach the curriculum and course content developed by Nasscom which will award certificates to successful candidates. 

Through this association, IFIM is committed to training 10,000 professionals across the state. “Training students in data analytics skills will enable them to deal with huge volumes of unstructured and structured data and capture and warehouse it in innovative ways,” says Dr. Sandhya Chintala, executive director and vice president, Nasscom.

 

InnoVenture 2017

Pune-based IntelligencePlus Eduvision LLP (estb. 2012) invites applications from students in the 9-14 age group for the 4th edition of its InnoVenture 2017, a national level ideation and entrepreneurship contest comprising three rounds of elimination. Initiated in 2014, the objective of InnoVenture is to stimulate problem-solving, innovative and creative thinking skills among school children. The grand finale is scheduled to be staged in Pune in January 2018 and prizes valued at Rs.2.5 crore will be awarded to winners. The last date for registration is August 31.

“While the Central government is gearing up to aggressively promote skill development and entrepreneurship, we have initiated InnoVenture to help children develop 21st century skills from early age. The capabilities of ideation, innovation and execution are the most important skills children need to develop to succeed in an increasingly complex global economy,” says Pranjal Gundesha, founder-CEO of IntelligencePlus.

 

Sportseed-CII whitepaper

The Delhi-based Confederation of Indian Industry’s national committee on sports has commissioned the Delhi-based KSR Sportseed Pvt. Ltd which provides sports curriculums to over  100 schools in ten states countrywide to write a whitepaper setting national curriculum standards for sports education in schools. The whitepaper was released by the minister of state for North-east development, Dr. Jitendra Singh, at Scorecard 2017, CII’s flagship sports event on July 6. 

“Of the 1.5 million schools in India with an aggregate enrolment of 260 million children, structured sports education curriculums are being implemented in about 2,000 schools. Our whitepaper highlights the need for adoption of formal sports education standards for children of all age groups to enable talent identification and development countrywide. It also benchmarks sports education standards in leading sporting nations such as the UK, USA, Australia, and Singapore,” says a Sportseed spokesperson. 

 

Qualcomm India winners

The San Diego, California-based Qualcomm Inc announced six winners of the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QInF) programme in India for the academic year 2017-2018 in Bangalore on July 20. 

QInF is a programme created by Qualcomm’s R&D team that invests in university Ph D students to cultivate new and forward thinking ideas, and stimulate research and development. In 2016, QInF India was launched to include Masters and Ph D students from India. This year, graduate students from top-ranked Indian higher ed institutions submitted proposals on advances in communication techniques; robotics and drones; computer vision and virtual reality; imaging and machine learning.

The six winning teams which will be awarded Rs.10 lakh each for the academic year 2017-18 and mentorship from Qualcomm engineers are: IIT-Kharagpur (Avisek Lahiri and Abhinav Agarwalla), IIT-Bombay (Pratik Kalshetti), IIIT-Hyderabad (Junaid Ahmed Ansari and Sarthak Sharma), IIT-Kharagpur (Sayandeep Saha and Sikhar Patranabis), IIT-Kharagpur (Preety Priya and Sucharita Chakraborty), and IISc, Bangalore (Reneeta Sara Isaac). 

“We are very encouraged by the response from the participating teams and  especially the very high quality of proposals,” said Dr. Dhananjay Gore, head of Qualcomm Research India,  speaking on the occasion.