Dr. M Sasikumar

Associate Director

CDAC Mumbai

About us• Olabs developed by Educational Technology Unit (ETU) of CDAC Mumbai, and Amrita University.

• ETU is one of the R&D divisions in CDAC Mumbai

• To spearhead new models and technologies towards a more effective learning environment

• Activities span research, creating awareness and developing software in areas like:

• Online Assessments

• Interactive Content: design and development

• Personalization

• Learning Management systems

• Intelligent Tutoring Systems

Some Projects in Progress

• Activities related to effective use of

Technology in school education

• A course repository for Class IX and X teachers

including T-labs (tools for teachers)

• Online Labs

• CCE Framework

• Other related activities

• OBRIC - Objective responses -- image based

capture

• eBasta – School Books to eBooks

Enhancements to framework to support OLabs on mobile devices like

Aakash tablet.

Online Labs

About OlabsOnline Labs for School Experiments

Provides students with the ease andconvenience of conducting experiments overthe internet.

Developed to supplement the traditional

physical labs and bridge the constraints of time

and geographical distances.

Gives a student the flexibility to repeat, explore,

and conduct experiments till they are thorough.

Interactive activities for Physics, Biology,

Mathematics, English and Chemistry

experiments covering topics like Hooke’s Law,

Reflection in Concave Mirror, Pythagoras

theorem etc available for online access.

Each experiment has sections covering related

Theory, Procedure, Animation, Simulation, Assessment, Reference material, etc.

Salient FeaturesOnline Labs for School Experiments

Interactive Simulations which model real life

environment and behavior.

Facilitates teachers to adapt simulations to

better suit their teaching methodology.

Includes features such as recording

observations, plotting graphs, calculations,

generating lab sheet, etc which enhance the

overall learning experience.

Intuitive feedback and guidance at relevant

places.

Web based access at www.olabs.edu.in. A CD

version is also available for schools constrained

with internet usage.

OLabs Project Website

Outer Structure of a Experiment

MATHS LAB

Mathematics – Lab Activity

• Each lab activity has the following

components :● Theory

● Procedure

● Simulator

● Animation

● Self Evaluation

● References and Feedback

• Interactive simulator has been developed tosimulate the activity given in Lab manual.

• Simulations helps student to understand and memorise the concept related to activity.

Mathematics Lab Structure

List of Mathematics Activities• Class IX

• Mid Point Theorem

• Area of Triangle

• Area of Trapezium

• Area of Rhombus

• Area of Parallelogram

• Circumcentre of a Triangle

• Centroid of a Triangle

• Incentre of a Triangle

• Orthocentre of a Triangle

• Class X• Volume of a Sphere

• Surface Area of a Sphere

• Angle at the centre of a circle by an arc

• Volume of Right Circular Cone

• Pythagoras Theorem

• To Find Area Of Right Circular Cylinder

• To Find the Volume of Right Circular Cylinder

• Tangents drawn from an external point

• Arithmetic Progression

ENGLISH LAB

• No conventional Lab for English

• Teachers and schools have expressed a need for ‘grammar labs’; not formally defined in CBSE curriculum.

• OLabs English – an attempt to

• Inculcate grammar skills,

• Improve comprehension skills

• Activities aligned to Class IX-X English Syllabus

• Main Reference books - Formative Assessment Manual & English

Workbook

• Each Lab

• Addresses one concept.

• Consists of number of interactive exercises related to learning

the concept

Concept of English Lab

• Use of canned sentences for activities

• Limited coverage

• Since number of sentences is limited, eventually output is

predictable

• Tedious to generate explanation or give feedback.

• Approach – Using template and repository, generation of syntactically correct and meaningful sentences

• Using sentence templates can generate potentially large

number of sentences as the vocabulary base & templates

increase

• As sentences are auto-generated, easy to convert from one

form to another, based on the rule base.

English Lab – Sentence Generation

component

Sample Template

<? xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"

standalone="yes"?>

<template>

<sentence id=“1" type = "simple">

<subject>

<noun type = "person"/>

</subject>

<predicate>

<verb category = "Transitive">

<infinitive type = "play" tense =

"present">

<subverb type = "-"/>

</infinitive>

</verb>

<object>

<noun type = "playable"/>

</object>

</predicate>

</sentence>

</template>

Sentences generated using the template

Active voice: Ram plays hockey

Passive voice: Hockey is played by Ram

Active voice: John plays tennis

Passive voice: Tennis is played by John

Active voice: Peter plays cricket

Passive voice: Cricket is played by Peter

Active voice: Sita plays flute

Passive voice: Flute is played by Sita

Active voice: Anna plays guitar

Passive voice: Guitar is played by Anna

English Lab – Sentence Generation Component

List of Available English Activities

Active Voice to Passive Voice

Direct to Indirect Speech

Tense Conversion Activity

Science Labs

List of Available Chemistry Labs

• Separation of mixture using different techniques

• Chemical reactions

• Distnguish between mixture and compound

• Distinguish between solutions

• Melting point of ice

• Boiling point of water

• Separation of components of a mixture

• Rutherford’s scattering experiment

• Exothermic and endothermic reactions

• Learning chemistry through periodic table

• The law of conservation of mass in a chemical reaction

List of Available Chemistry Labs

• Determine pH with pH indicator strips…

• Single displacement reaction

• Combination reaction

• Decomposition reaction

• Properties of acids and bases

• Double displacement reaction

• Properties of Acetic acid

• To study the relative reactivity of metals

• Cleaning capacity of soap with hard and soft water

• Saponification – the process of making soap

• Melting point/boiling point of organic compound

• Force Required to Move a Wooden Block on a Horizontal Table

• Verification of Newton's third law of motion using two spring

balances

• Laws of Reflection of Sound

• Determination of Density of Solid

• Verification of Archimedes' Principle

• Pressure Exerted by a Solid Iron Cuboid on Sand

• Determine the Velocity of a Pulse Propagated Through a Slinky

• Bell Jar Experiment

• Newton’s Second Law

• Equivalent resistance of resistors connected in series

• Equivalent resistance of resistors connected in parallel

• Ohm’s Law

List of Available Physics Labs

List of Available Biology Labs• Characteristics of Plants

• Detection of starch in food samples

• Detection of adulterant in Dal

• Onion and Cheek Cells

• Plant and Animal Tissues

• Imbibition by Raisins and Seeds

• Monocot and Dicot Plants

• Life Cycle of a Mosquito

• Demonstration of Stomata on a Leaf Peel

• Importance of Light in Photosynthesis

• Role of Carbon dioxide During Respiration

• Asexual Reproduction in Amoeba and Yeast

• Homology and Analogy

• Embryo of Dicot Seeds

• Study of Osmosis

Jan 2012 – Dec 2014

Website Analytics

OLabs on Aakash

OLabs in Regional Languages

OLabs - Highlights

• In Feb 2012, CBSE chairman has

recommended use of OLabs in schools

in a circular to all CBSE schools.

• OLabs is already deployed or being

deployed, in over 30 schools.

• Over 11000+ students have registered

on OLabs Website.

• Usage of Olabs from the portal is free for all schools in India.

• Olabs Rollout proposal envisages training of teachers across CBSE schools in India, and richer hosting.

• Regional workshops for clusters of schools can be planned.

• Feedback welcome

• on the current Olabs system

• local variations

• potential additions

• Olabs in Indian languages is important – we invite you to contribute to translating Olabs to various Indian languages.

Path ahead…

Thank You Dr. Sasikumar

sasi@cdac.in

CDAC Mumbai

OLabs URL: www.olabs.edu.in

OBRIC

About OBRIC● Can be used for objective type tests, feedback forms, survey forms, etc.

● Input to OBRIC is scanned images of response sheets.

● Output of OBRIC is text file containing the processed data in the format specified by output configuration file.

● Currently includes following modules (independent) for processing output file:–Result Processing Module

–Feedback for Processing Module

Features● OBRIC is fully configurable.

–We can design our own sheet according to paper pattern and IMR can be configured for the respective sheet.

–Output of processed sheets can be configured.

● OBRIC can be used with any type of paper.–No need to use specific type of paper as in case of OMR (which is not readily available).

–Tests can be conducted on a normal A4 sized paper.

Sample Image of OBRIC sheet

● OBRIC is independent of scanner

model.–No need to use specific type of scanner as in case

of OMR (which is expensive).

–Any normal paper scanner can be used for

scanning IMR sheets. (For example, HP Scanjet)

● OBRIC saves money.–As no specific expensive scanners as well as

papers are needed for IMR, it makes IMR a very

economical and cheaper system.

OLabs – some statistics

OLabs Phase-I Statistics Summary

Item Number

Total number of experiments 42

Total schools trained 143

Total users registered 57809

Teachers trained 535+

Workshops conducted 15

Visitors to websites in the last 5 months 30683+

Page views 198,727+

❑School & Pilot▪ Total number of schools

visited in person is 337

▪ Trained around teachers 4275

▪ Total registration: 58,000

▪ Students from 12,553 schools registered inside and outside India

Deployment Statistics

SCREENSHOTS

English Lab Architecture

Nouns, Verbs,

Tenses, Preposition,

Adjectives,

Adverbs

Base Layer

Middle Layer API

Sentence

generation

Rule based conversion

(inflections)

Core component

access

Application Layer

Semantic KB

Sentence

templates,

Grammatical

Rules

Syntactic KB

Picture Repository,

Sentence

Repository,

Multi-media

repository

Miscellaneous

Activity & Exercise

Manager

Feedback

GenerationEvaluation

• Base Layer - core components• Basic English Language components’ repository

• Nouns, Verbs, Tenses, Preposition, Adjectives, Adverbs, etc

• All components stored with respective properties

• Inter-component relations also captured

• Sentence templates

• Grammatical rules

• Picture repository with annotations

• Sentence repository with meta-data

• Multi-media repository

• Hints

English Lab - Architecture

• Middle Layer API – Reusable across activities

• Generate sentences using the repository and templates

• Enable Dynamic interaction with images (based on

annotations)

• Conversion from one form to another based on

grammatical rules

• Access to core components’ repository

• Dynamic Feedback generation based on grammatical rules

English Lab - Architecture