She tapped on the screen with her fingers. Then, she dug her nails, lightly. Nothing happened. None of the icons on the touchcreen came alive. And then she tapped harder. The e-book reader opened up. “There you go. The touchscreen isn’t that good but it is a nice product,” says Shilpey Dewan.
For almost a fortnight now, Dewan, a 21-year-old student at TERI University, has been spending time decoding Aakash, the $35 tablet launched by the MHRD on October 5 and hailed as the “world’s cheapest”, as part of her assignment to conduct field testing for the tablet.
Dewan has been involved with the project ever since her teacher Pradeep Varma brought the tablet to class one day, when it was still in the development stages, and asked the class to design a logo for the tablet. The tablet, they were told, was meant to be a tool to bridge the digital divide in the country and help students in semi-urban centres and rural areas get access to education material developed in the premier institutes of the country. Besides the logo, Varma asked his students, whom he divided into groups, to suggest distribution alternatives to the government. Dewan’s group recommended distributing the tablets via post so that the government could use the widespread network of the department.
The name they had in mind for the product was ‘Eklavya’, the mythological model student in the epic Mahabharata. They designed a logo around the name but they didn’t win the competition. “Aakash is a good name, too,” she says.
Source : Indian Express
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