Intelligent & interactive technologies for classrooms

Senses Electronics was established with the vision to bring about a change in the traditional teaching-learning methodology in education institutions. Prashant Peethambaran, Co Founder & CTO, Senses Electronic speaks about their focus on revolutionising the education sector in India through their new age classroom technologies. “The company intends to enable every teacher teach concepts accurately and effectively, and every student experience fun based learning easily, and ensure that every parent is confident about their child’s learning journey,” he says. To enable this they built the Intelligent Interactive Panel (IIP) which has seen 8000 plus successful installations in 700 plus schools across India. In fact, Senses Electronics holds upto 70 per cent of market share of interactive panels in the Indian education industry.

The company aims to provide state-of-the-art classroom solution for the growing education sector in India. “Our Interactive Intelligent Panel takes care of all the teaching needs in a classroom. It’s a single integrated LED panel based solution, where IIP can be used as automated whiteboard as well as running a piece of e-content in the classroom. When we say integrated, it’s all in one system with High resolution LED display, 20 point touch, powerful i7 industrial CPU, audio amplifier and connectivity like USB, Bluetooth, Ethernet and Wifi,” states Peethambaran, adding that it’s an open Windows based system to support any online and offline e-content. Easy to use inbuilt whiteboard application support free writing, annotation on image/video, text and shape recognition, gesture control on an infinitecanvas, AI based voice recognition and more importantly save and share the whiteboard session on email and cloud.

“IIP is also loaded with classroom addressing software, classroom monitoring software and classroom scheduler without the need of any additional hardware,” he mentions.

The benefits for the students are obvious – they get a much better viewing experience than the traditional smart board. Since it’s a zero radiation certified and low luminous level, it is completely health safe in the classroom. “Students can easily collaborate on important whiteboard session shared over the mail or cloud. Classroom lectures can be recorded in static format as well as standard video format, which can be used by students for effective learning,” explains Peethambaran.

He also points out that institutions can save a lot of cost on operations. It is a single integrated system, unlike traditional smart board, this system does not have any maintenance cost. IIPs are designed to save energy, hence consume almost one sixth of power compared to projector based system. “Since it is build over all commercial grade components, the expected life is around 50,000 hours i.e around 13 years,” he further informs.

The company has a strong after sales service team which makes sure any issue related to the hardware or software of the system is resolved within 24-48 hours. “Our training support enables institutes to access unlimited teacher training sessions for upto a period of three years,” asserts Peethambaran.

The target clientele is primarily primary, secondary and higher education classrooms. “We have a PAN India presence, but have seen most of the growth happening in southern and western parts of India,” says Peethambaran, adding further that while in India, this technology been used in less than 10 per cent of classrooms, in countries like China has more than 80 per cent classrooms have adopted the same.

There is however an upward trend in India for adoption of hi-tech classroom technologies. Reminding that IIP as a hardware is still under-utilised, Peethambaran states, “We will continuously improve solution as per Indian education needs, free of cost to customers. In coming years IIP will provide solutions which any classroom needs, from automated attendance, to classroom session recording, to live Q&A sessions with marginal or no additional hardware cost. This year we are also focusing on providing innovative device solution for students.”

With focus on R&D the company is strategically investing and expanding its presence in India, and coming up with a 10,000 sqft manufacturing and R&D centre in Pune, where it is headquartered. The R&D workforce has also been tripled.

Reminding that India is yet to catch up with modern classroom setup and connected learning technologies, he asserts that a technology upgrade in the Indian educational sector is needed because it addresses a number of problems faced by teachers, students and institutes. For example, it allows immediate and easy access to latest information on the internet, active learning opportunities like AV support, access to the internet, interactive games, etc., which makes the learning process fun and boosts a student’s creativity. “These AI driven panels can help better understand and retain the sessions which records every single session for future references. Exposure to world class education technology not only helps the student to adapt with the changing international education methods but will also make the student future ready,” he mentions.

Case Study : Sacred Heart School, Kerala

The management of Sacred Heart School from Kerala was tasked with the responsibility of increasing the reputation of the school and positively impact the results of the students.

The challenge was to find a technology for better concept retention in classrooms to improve pass percentages and interactive teaching learning process. Schools face an enormous challenge to showcase real learning outcomes which impact their admissions.

Usually, institutions prefer to use panels for primary and secondary classes. They do not directly adapt the panel for higher classes like 10th and 12th standards. However, Sacred Heart School installed the panel for 10th and 12^th standards. They used the unique feature of the panel in which one can record the entire session taught in the class and can replay whenever needed with ease.

The institute completely removed the traditional blackboard system from their classrooms and installed the Senses IIP. The teachers and students used this replay feature for their classroom interactions and revisions. This practice positively impacted the final board results. There was a 6 per cent increment in the pass percentage in the board exams.