Atal Innovation Mission (AIM), NITI Aayog today signed an agreement with Dassault Systemes Foundation to jointly work towards providing a digitally rich ecosystem of Innovation in India and promoting STEM based innovation and entrepreneurship among aspiring young minds across the country.

One of the flagship programs of AIM, the Atal Tinkering Labs (ATLs) has played a pivotal role in fostering creativity and imagination amongst school children. Dassault Systemes Foundation dedicated to transform the future of education and research in India with 3D technologies and virtual universes, is all set to contribute to the ATL program in three broad areas - project based, self-paced learning content, hackathons and challenges and inter-country academia collaborations.

Dassault Systemes Foundation has designed and developed an initiative as part of its CSR objectives, initial set of ‘Ready to use’ well documented self-learning training cum instructional playbook, with appropriate videos for visual understanding which they would be sharing with the ATL students that they can access digitally. This playbook comes with instructional videos for teachers so that it can be implemented with minimal support from experts. This content shall be available for AIM to offer to all schools with ATLs and other schools as well as out of school children in India for use.

Under this SoI, Dassault Systemes Foundation shall design and organise innovative challenges / hackathons for ATLs, promoting problem solving skills, scientific and technology based exploratory learning skills and innovation culture amongst students and teachers.

Speaking during a virtual session of SoI signing today, Mission Director AIM, NITI Aayog, R Ramanan said, “We feel privileged to launch the partnership of Atal Innovation Mission with Dassault Systemes Foundation. Dassault Systems are global leaders in design and engineering of large-scale mission critical systems. This would not only enable great interest in scientific research and innovation for our ATL Tinkering Lab students but also stimulate engineering innovation capability making them future ready innovators and job creators from India accessing world class content available through Dassault.”

Sharing his thoughts about the collaboration with AIM, Chairman of Board of Directors, Sudarshan Mogasale, Dassault Systemes Foundation, India said, “Since the inception of Dassault Systemes Foundation in India, we have been engaged in several activities to imbibe the spirit of innovation, and empowering our next generation students to be Future Ready. The association with Atal Innovation Mission will take this journey to newer heights as we work with Atal Tinkering Labs across the country to augment the spirit of innovation in school children. We are happy to contribute to Atal Innovation Mission’s dream to bring out this transformation in schools in India.”

He further said that as part of the association, “Dassault Systemes Foundation will contribute with project based, activities based and self-paced learning content for Atal Tinkering Labs. The learning content has been created and validated by experienced faculty members from this domain. With AIM, joint hackathons will be hosted, student challenges and inter country academia collaboration programs will be organised for schools to inculcate innovation, product design and a maker’s culture among the school students and seed the interest of being future innovators, entrepreneurs.”

Through this collaboration, AIM and Dassault Systemes Foundation shall jointly encourage inter country collaborations amongst schools and school students for collaborative science / technology learning, skilling and cultural interactions amongst students.