Footsteps organized a workshop titled “E-Myth” from 2nd to 5th March 2016 at Dronacharya College of Engineering, Gurgaon. The first year students of ECE, EEE, ECS, CSE IT & ME Branch participated in the workshop. The workshop was conducted by Mr. Rohit Kandakatla, founder CEO of Footsteps and President of SPEED.

The objective of the workshop was to make students realize the importance of engineering career. Footsteps is a social venture that focuses on to identify and encourage today’s youth to prepare them for the unforeseen future using education as a powerful tool.

During the inauguration session, welcome note was delivered by Honourable Principal Prof (Dr.) Karanjit Singh, in which he emphasized on the message that dreams are life changers. Dr. Singh stated that for successful completion of any task, one should perform them with utmost interest aligning all body actions to the mind and put in one’s hundred percent efforts. He motivated the students to develop interest in engineering and learn the concepts that would be implemented for the betterment of the society. The students were also encouraged by Prof. (Dr.) Sri Krishan Yadav, Head, Department of Applied Sciences & Humanities for active participation.

Mr. Rohit Kandakatla, started the session by stating that human beings have been working to make lives easier. Engineers are responsible for providing frugal innovative solutions to the problems faced by the common people. Mr. Kandakatla said that after completing engineering majority of the students realize that they lack the necessary employability skills and the workshop was designed to bust all the myths related to engineering.

The aim of the workshop was to make students realize the practical implementation of the concepts that they learn during the course of engineering. The event started by dividing the participants into teams which were made on the basis of digits called out by the students from 1 to 10. All the students with same digit were grouped into a team. This process made the students to team up with other participants in the class and forced them to come out of their comfort zones. They were then given some time to name their teams and interact with other team members.

All the students were then divided into groups of two and the partners were sitting in different rows right besides each other. All the students sitting on the odd rows were asked to turn their back towards the projector and face their partners who were sitting right besides them. Then students sitting on the even rows were shown a picture on the projector. These students who were able to see the picture had to explain to their partners about the picture that they see only by speaking without any hand movements and the other partner on the odd rows had to draw that picture. This activity was conducted to improve communication between two people, make them understand each other’s perspective and have confidence in what they wanted to say by making an eye contact.

A video clip from a movie was shown to participants, and they were asked to note all the concepts laws of physics that they observed in the video clip. The students came up with different concepts that they had learnt so far like Newton’s laws, law of buoyancy, centrifugal force, force of gravity, Pascal’s law and others which they could observe in the clip.

The teams were asked to practically create a covering for dropping a cargo safely and prevent it from falling outside its cover, utilizing the least amount of inventory. The other points to be noted were that the cargo and its packaging must remain undamaged after landing and the target must be cost effective and re-usable.

The models of participants were checked by dropping them from a height of 2 metres and the one which provided safe landing for cargo and having the least cost was declared as the winner. The activity was designed to make them practically apply the law of gravity and coming up with solutions to make the cargo smooth sailing when falling down. The students very enthusiastically participated in this activity and came with different models. It was full of fun and learning for the students.

The workshop provided the students a different perspective for engineering and developed interest and passion towards it. They developed a sense of confidence for the career they have chosen and were able to realize the strength of team work, innovation and problem solving attitude.

Some Glimpses