 |
| Sarath Lakshman, Jawaharlal Nehru Government Higher Secondary School, Mahe sarathlakshman@yahoo.com |
Some try to clear the bar of challenge set by others while few others set the challenge for themselves. School boy Sarath Lakshman, a Standard 10 student of Jawaharlal Nehru Government Higher Secondary School, Mahe, belongs to the second category. His achievements so far: an e-periodic table for easy learning of periodic table which has been included in the resource CD for it@school programme in the state, an animation-based tutor for electronics titled Electronic Studio MX and a distribution of Linux titled SLYNUX.
One day in the chemistry class of Standard 9, it struck Sarath that teaching of the periodic table could be made more student-friendly. This idea inspired him to develop the e-periodic table which helps students to learn the position of elements, their atomic numbers etc.
He then thought of developing a software program to help students learn the basics of electronics, his passion since childhood. He soon came up with the animation-based electronics tutor that explains the concepts in electronics.
With the confidence born of the successful completion of two projects, he next turned his attention to Linux Operating System, which he had been told was difficult to operate. He soon found that though the OS was very good in matters of security and smoothness of operation, the names of programmes would be confusing to the average user. “The fact that Linux uses inter-dependent system files excited me and convinced me that I could make this OS simpler and easy to comprehend,” he explained.
After 7 months of effort he was able to bring out a product that would run out of a CD without installation. The Slynux includes all standard programmes plus support for internal modems and Malayalam fonts.
“I would like to see more students using this free software. If we can have something free, why spend lakhs of rupees purchasing proprietary software,” he asks.
Courtesy:
G.Mahadevan
(text), S.Gopakumar (photo), The Hindu, January 11, 2005
Contributed by: Administrator
