Animation, scratch programmes now part of school IT fest

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Keeping in tune with the hi-tech school drive, the state school IT fest this year would feature new items such as animation creation and scratch programming.
The existing IT quiz, digital painting and webpage creation items in high school and higher secondary divisions would remain unchanged. However, project presentation has been substituted with multimedia presentation. Contestants would be given a specific theme just before the time set for the contest.
The contestants would have to create an animation of not less than 20 seconds within a time of one hour using TupiTube Desk software and the topic of the animation would be provided to them 10 minutes prior to the test. Another new competition item for the IT est is the scratch programming, developed by MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), USA using which students have to create games and animations. With the introduction of new items in the IT fest from this year, the competition items for high school section would increase from 6-7 while that in higher secondary section it would increase from 5 -7.
In a step to encourage the teachers, who voluntarily develop ICT educational resources, this year onwards, the State IT Fest would feature a competition exclusively for teachers on ICT training aids. For this, the teachers would have to create digital contents aligning with the learning objectives in the prevailing textbooks and which can be transacted within a regular period’s time.
As many as 19,000 students from 6,200 schools had participated in the sub-district IT melas, in the previous years. Similarly, 4,150 students and 308 students had competed in the district-level and state-level IT fests, respectively. All the competitions in the state IT fest would be conducted entirely in free software platform. KITE had deployed necessary software and learning modules in schools with which all students with aptitude and skills can be participated.