Get your physics lecture delivered while eating fries

HANDHELD devices seem to be moving from the briefcase to the backpack.
The latest educational gadget doing the test rounds in Bangalore is a ` 3,000 box the size of a pack of cards, full of science, math and language lessons - and a promise to be cheaper by half.

The SmartBox that won the best product award at the India Semiconductor Association ( ISA) Vision Summit 2011 here on Monday has been designed for schools. Puru Mishra, the boss of the startup Suphalaam, would like to see his device in every student's instrument box.

While working with the British chipmaker ARM, Mishra, an IITBombay electronic engineer, had engaged with village students in a voluntary initiative that helped many of them move to better schools. " But even then the teaching standards were not good enough." With its multimedia content SmartBox tries to chip in with good teaching practices. Open it and you can hear a lecture on gas laws – or modern Kannada poetry for that matter. While the lecturer explains how gases behave under different conditions and how molecules move around to make it happen, the touch screen displays bubbles shrinking and blowing up.

" It allows the student to access content in school, at home or while travelling," Mishra notes.

" Then it allows him or her to test and track progress." For the teacher, it is a tool that enables paperless attendance, instant class polls, homework distribution, tallying test results and so on.

While an entry level SmartBox costs ` 3,000 ( including taxes and import duty on components), a WiFi enabled Pro version that syncs with the teacher's display costs ` 4,000. Mishra wants to sell the basic model for ` 2,000 and then introduce a no- frills, blackand- white box that replaces the touch screen with buttons for ` 1,500.

Coming ten years after the Simputer, the ` 9000 simple computer that was designed by four Indian Institute of Science professors, the new box could be a " killer", Mishra feels. Simputer was used in a literacy drive in central India before a booming handheld market shunned it. SmartBox, however, is different as it is not a netconnected device. Suphalaam is talking with private groups, NGOs and the government for partnerships that would hopefully spread the technology.

Palmtops and handhelds are increasingly being used worldwide for school work. In the US and Europe students use them in science and math classes to record graphs and data and crunch them.

While observers see them aiding children's exposure to an increasingly wired world, they also raise questions.

" Many companies are pushing such devices, the government has its own cheap laptop programme, and then there are proven schemes like One Laptop per Child," said Anivar Aravind, a Bangalore- based IT observer. " The question is what does the government want to promote and how such technologies will help in the new national curriculum framework," he said.

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