IIT Bombay Has Launched A Project To Mentor Rural Girls In STEM Fields

WISE (Women in Science Engineering from Rural Parts of India) is an outreach effort launched by IIT-Bombay to tackle the lopsided gender ratio in STEM courses. The inaugural event under the scheme, which will now be held on an annual basis, was recently held.

The initiative, which is aimed at rural girls in the ninth grade, aims to introduce STEM courses and includes a mentorship framework in which student volunteers from IIT Bombay would follow up with the girls on a regular basis.

Between May 22 and 26, 160 girls from 40 schools in rural Maharashtra, Bihar, and Odisha visited the IIT Bombay campus as part of its inaugural event. The kids slept on campus for a week in Hostel 15 and received a special peep into IIT life.

They had a rigorous programme that included hands-on activities in the institute's many labs. Building a simple light bulb circuit to a complicated FM radio, various sensor and actuator circuits controlled by a simple microprocessor, and working on a remote-controlled rover robot from scratch were among the exercises. There were also motivational interaction sessions with remarkable women in STEM professions on the agenda. The girls also got to try out Virtual Reality (VR) using a cutting-edge VR headset. Each day, the top speedcubers in India taught the girls how to solve the Rubik's Cube. The bulk of the girls solved the cube in under five minutes. The final event involved drone construction.