We work with Colleges and Institutes to start Open Community Science & Technology Spaces in their Campus. This is to foster a culture of citizen science. We have a few guidelines and requirements to collaborate with institutes:
- Most of our labs will be based in a college or institute. As a result we require a lab space to be provided by the institute for a lock-in period of at least 6 years that will be exclusively used for this purpose only.
- Starting up financial resources and materials provided by the college along withtheir running costs. VigyanShaala will assist in setting up labs, provide quality mentors,provide its own experimental materials to be housed in the lab. Details and costs of this can vary for different Colleges/Institutes, and can discussed further.
- At least 2 dedicated and committed staff member from the hosting college who are interested in this venture and are willing to spend 5-8 hours a week in the lab doing projects, nurturing students doing their projects.
- Commitments that these labs will be accessible to schools and college students in the vicinity. We aspire this lab to be a community nodal point for STEM where students from school and college create novel and exciting projects with the help of the mentors.
- We would expect the college to 1. Provide a full time staff for VigyanShaala to take care of the lab and whom we shall train OR 2. A dedicated staff of the college who will take charge of the lab and with whom VS and its partners will do a tech transfer with. Ideally we would like to have 3 staff and 10 students for a tech-transfer model.
Our motive is to heavily impact the culture of the colleges and institutes that we work with. We work with partner with decades of experience and have learnt that it usually takes a few years to observe large changes and lot of effort is required. It is not very difficult though and can be done with effort and persistence. Hence we require serious commitment from the institutes and colleges we collaborate with, to make tangible changes. Please submit the contact form with subject “Start a VigyanShaala Lab:”.
