KOLPOKOUSHOL: An Antidisciplinary Experimental Lab
Kolpokoushol is an open platform for talented individuals of Bangladesh to work together, and develop new ideas, despite the differences in their fields of education. With the unique idea of an antidisciplinary environment inspired by the MIT Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Kolpokoushol intends to encourage its participants to solve local and community specific problems.
From July 21 to July 24, Kolpokoushol held a workshop for students who value creativity and have an interest in engineering or mathematics in the undergraduate level. Other than students with such backgrounds, they also accepted students from journalism, law, business, fine arts and even schools and colleges. The selection process is highly competitive as the students have to excel in an application specially designed by the mentors of this year.
This year, the workshop included Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed (PhD candidate, Cornell University), Deeni Fatiha (MIT '13, Harvard '18), Syed Arefinul Haque (PhD student, Northeastern University), Arpeeta Shams Mizan (LLM, Harvard Law School '15), Devabrata Chakraborty (Director, Governance Innovation Unit, Prime Minister's Office) and the founder of Kolpokoushol, Nazmus Saquib (PhD student, MIT Media Lab) who carried out several interactive sessions focused on innovating the use of data analytics in the fields of journalism and law in Bangladesh. Sessions and projects were offered in more topics like mixed reality, big data visualisation and wearable electronics.
Throughout the whole programme, the participants got to brainstorm about a variety of innovative topics such as design thinking, data science, law adoption and rapid hardware prototyping. At the end of the four day-long programme, highly original prototypes were the final output of the participants, who worked together in groups regardless of their major and age. On July 24, the projects were open for public display.
Nazmus Saquib, founder and director of Kolpokoushol says, "Our goal at Kolpokoushol is much more than holding workshops. It is an experimental lab and an idea generation ground for students where we aim to merge ideas with a bigger vision to make changes in the community. Kolpokoushol's idea is to grow and promote an antidisciplinary culture, and work with students in the process."
One of the participants, Labib, 17, says, "This programme allowed me to work with a project on mixed reality to educate children with special needs – something I am deeply passionate about but couldn't have done anywhere else."
The mentors of the workshop plan on providing further technical and logistical help to the participants' projects throughout the year. The most promising projects from the workshop will soon be deployed in the official website www.kolpokoushol.org.
Kolpokoushol promises the beginning of an initiative that can go a long way in making students approach a wider path in working with different professionals and growing to become a creative individual. It is suitable for enthusiastic young minds who are interested to understand the idea of an antidisciplinary environment and to get a hands-on research experience in a field of their choice. This year, they are looking forward to building an open hardware lab in Bangladesh. Kolpokoushol is also working on making data accessible to the public by the end of the year. To understand law and news data and get access to them is the people's rights and along with the student collaborators, Kolpokoushol is working on making data access easier for all citizens. The team plans on continuing such unique workshop in the coming years and hopes to find more exciting young people from Bangladesh.
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