By Sameer Ahmad
Anantnag: Meet Azmat Zahoor peer, a budding tech inventor hails from North kashmir’s sopore area has won Raspberry Pi jam Foundation award 2021.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK-based charity that works to put the power of computing and digital making into the hands of young Children’s all over the world.
Azmat is a class 10th student from Model Public School, Model Town Sopore which is the first school in the Valley where Pi Jam Foundation made its intervention for the cause they work for.
Azmat has been learning Coding and problem solving from Pi Jam Foundation since last one year, which is actually a Pune based non-profit organization, entered the Valley for the first time.
Azmat is Learning coding and problem solving, on the platform of Pi Jam, has given a vent to her creativity. She is now able to identify a problem and tries to find a viable solution for it in a systematic way.
An international event organized every year, for the past nine years, by Raspberry Pi Foundation and sponsored by various international companies.
In this event, budding tech enthusiasts from all over the world submit their projects on games, animations, utility apps, educational apps etc.
This year in 2021, around 1385 young tech inventors and innovators from 47 countries had submitted their projects.
Azmat is the only budding tech inventor from India whose project was shortlisted and the only student from India who was provided a chance to share her learning experiences live in front of a global audience on 8 June when the result was being declared in a live program streamed on YouTube.
She named her project as COVID-19 helpline website.
This project caught the attention of the Judges of the Coolest Projects and she won Raspberry Pi jam Foundation award 2021 and international recognition for it.
Azmat wants to become a teacher and incorporate the use of technology in teaching as she has seen her Pi Jam instructors do during her sessions.
She believes that use of technology in teaching-learning makes it more effective, economical and purposeful.
Azmat hails from a village called ‘Pot Khah Muqam’ which is 15 kilometers away from Sopore area of North Kashmir.
Azmat also believes that learning coding and problem solving is essential like other subjects. As the world is going under drastic changes with every passing day, learning these important digital skills will help a person to survive and compete with others.
Meanwhile The PiJam Foundation provides students in schools, access and training to low-cost open source technologies to foster skills like digital making, problem solving and design thinking. They have purchased and use the raspberry pi, which is a low-cost, pocket-sized computer specifically designed for education of students. Through their model, students are exposed to real world problems, which they are required to build solutions for, using technology and their existing academic concepts. These real-world problems lie in the domains of immediate school problems, climate change, pollution control, food and agriculture and other issues in their own communities. They have developed a database of easy to use APIs for complex electronic devices that allow students to use these tools without them getting bogged down by the technicalities. These APIs have been designed in a manner that still requires usage of basic programming concepts that push a child to think logically.
