Facilitating the biggest international AI and coding competition for Children
The Motwani Jadeja Foundation is proud to have sponsored the Codeavour 2020 competition, the biggest international AI and coding competition for kids.
Hosted by STEMpedia, and bringing together 5,426 teams from 98 countries, the support helped take this competition to new heights, providing the young participants with the best possible experience. The competition, held online, encouraged the next generation to bring out their inner coders and make innovative projects with PictoBlox.
Codeavour 2020 has succeeded at enabling children to explore the exciting worlds of AI and coding, and to develop critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and communication – the four C’s of the 21st-century skills – to create solutions for real-world problems.
“STEMpedia’s focus is always on enabling kids to explore new things around the world they are living in. Generation Z lives in the AI world before the social world. We want them to expose themselves to AI and learn the underlying fundamentals to build a strong curiosity.” Dhrupal Shah, Co-Founder & C.E.O
Themes for making the world a better place have included ‘Beat the Pandemic with AI’, in which kids can use their skills to try to solve problems that Covid-19 has presented; ‘Think Automation’ where kids can channel their ‘inner James Bond’ through automating their surroundings and making routine tasks go auto-pilot. By taking part in ‘AI and Coding for the Win,’ children explored and experimented with AI and coding in order to invent something new and exciting, and in ‘Entangling Transport Systems’, they imagined and designed innovative solutions to the world’s transportation problems. And perhaps one of the most exciting, in the ‘Space Odyssey’ children were encouraged to become frontrunners of space exploration and unravel mysteries of the universe. From small steps to giant leaps!
Codeavour 2020 helped children and young adults explore their dreams and the future of technology on many levels, not only presenting exciting projects, but also training up students and teachers. In association with schools, free Student Webinars were set up in order to motivate and teach AI & ML concepts to the students and kids. These were hugely popular, with the total number of student webinars conducted by STEMpedia Team at 136, and the total number of students trained on AL & ML by STEMpedia Team was a huge 9280. Through Teacher Trainings, moreover, 151 teachers were taught about AI & ML so that they could guide students and kids throughout the competition and further afield.
In its Social Outreach efforts, Codeavour 2020 also collaborated successfully with schools, activity centers, STEM/STEM businesses and NGOs, to take this competition to every corner of the world. The scale of this reach out was huge, with the total number of academic partners (i.e. schools and activity centers) at 76, the total number of partners at 52, and the total number of community partners at 5, confirming an impressive social impact.
In particular, Codeavour collaborated with the Agastya International Foundation to make the competition accessible for underprivileged children. Agastya’s vision is of a creative India, with it’s mission “to spark curiosity, nurture creativity, and instill confidence” in economically disadvantaged children and government school teachers. It aims to do this by bringing imaginative and innovative hands-on science education, project-based and peer-to-peer learning to schools, towns and villages across India. In order to support this cause, Codeavour trained over forty educators of Agastya Foundation on Artificial Intelligence. Now, these teachers will be able reach economically disadvantaged children in rural India through Agastya’s Mobile Labs, and to provide crucial training across various states. They will cover 10 regions across India and train 15-20 teams from each region, therefore hoping to draw 150 to 200 teams of underprivileged children from rural India, bringing opportunities and promise to their lives.
Codeavour also collaborated with INDIAai to make the competition reach even further afield, through the reach of its website. INDIAai is the National AI Portal of India – a central hub for everything AI in India and beyond – through the joint initiative of MeitY, NeGD and NASSCOM, and it aims to be the trusted content powerhouse in the backdrop of India’s journey to global prominence in Artificial Intelligence. By collaborating with this website, Codeavour was able to spread the word and include as many young minds as possible.