The Union Human Resource Development Minister, Smriti Zubin Irani, while felicitating the winners of the Code to Learn competition in New Delhi today made a suggestion to Google India team that in the next phase starting next year, it may identify students from Government schools across the country as well, for participating in this competition. She expressed her wish that in the next phase, at least 50 per cent students among the winners of this competition would be girls.The Union Minister said that this initiative was taken up under the Rashtriya Avishkar Abhiyan, a flagship scheme of Ministry of HRD. This kind of initiative she said could help in directly engaging with students who were so brilliant and also reflected the fact that the children were in tune with the concerns of one’s community members.
The Union HRD Minister also said that it gave a lot of hope for the future to learn that at 15 years of age one of the winners of the contest had a start-up and was also so successful. It was also a matter of great joy that our youngsters could really profess to the community and nation at large, she added. She congratulated the children as well as their parents for putting up such brilliant apps and projects specially the students for going beyond textbooks and using their skills which showed how far they could reach. The Union Minister also launched the 2016 edition of the Code to Learn Contest. Starting today, parents of students from class 5 to 10 can register on the students’ behalf on the contest website. Students can create their projects in Scratch or App Inventor and submit them on the contest site. Project submission will be open from 20th June, 2016 and the last day to submit projects is 31st July 2016.