BBK DAV College for Women organised a DBT Sponsored Workshop on Scratch, An Interactive Platform: Programming for All by Department of Biotechnology. Resource Person for the workshop was Mrs. Ritula Anand, an Independent researcher and visiting faculty at MIT, Cambridge and alumnus of the BBK DAV College for Women. Students of B.Sc (Biotech & Medical) Sem V attended the workshop. Mrs. Ritula first apprised the students about Scratch and how it is used to program one’s own interactive stories, games and animations. It is a free platform developed by MIT Media Lab. Mrs. Anand discussed with students that if they learn to code in Scratch, they can learn important strategies for designing their own projects, develop own ideas and their problem solving skills can also be enhanced. Since ability to code in computing is an integral part of literacy in today’s era, so its importance in building foundations for future cannot be ruled out.
Students of both the streams enthusiastically participated in the session and built their own scientific animations on Column Chromatography, Diffusion, Osmosis and Photosynthesis. With the source code freely available on the site, one can freely remix it to make innovative projects. Young minds are referred to as ‘Digital Natives’ in today’s era due to their fluency with techniques and gadgets. But in true sense, digital fluency does not mean ability to be proactive on social media or the chatting applications, rather it means designing, creating and remixing; and Scratch is doing wonders in making them digitally fluent. Users of Scratch are given a fancy name Scratchers, who on an average upload more than 1500 new projects every day.
Workshop was concluded with Vote of Thanks by Dr. Rashmi Kalia, Co-ordinator, Department of Biotechnology. Principal Dr. Pushpinder Walia, presented a memento to the guest and also congratulated staff members for arranging DBT Sponsored activities.