New Delhi, Apr 15 (KNN) Atal Innovation Mission (AIM), NITI Aayog has 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 transforming 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, an 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 organize innovative challenges/hackathons for ATLs, promoting problem-solving skills, scientific and technology-based exploratory learning skills, and innovation culture amongst students and teachers.

“We feel privileged to launch the partnership of Atal Innovation Mission with Dassault Systemes Foundation. Dassault Systems are global leaders in the 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,” said Mission Director AIM, NITI Aayog R Ramanan said while speaking during a virtual session of SoI signing on Wednesday.

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.