It is a sultry humid afternoon in the dusty bylanes of southeast Delhi’s Jaitpur. But the humid weather does little to dampen the enthusiasm of over 50 local students from Classes 6 to 12 working intensely on a range of technical models — a circuit for intelligent sensor-based lighting, a robotic arm, a dispenser machine, an automatic sliding door, and more.
Started by a Delhi-based techpreneur couple, Harpreet and Gagandeep Sapra, in June 2022, Makersbox Foundation is a free to walk-in two-room Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) lab space in Jaitpur. It’s a huge hit among the close to 150 neighbourhood school-going children, who increasingly find themselves spending their spare time tinkering around with wires, circuits and 3D printing machines, in batches.
Manisha (16) is helming a team of three that is working on a prototype of a sanitary pad dispenser machine to be fitted in low resource schools. She places a wooden box on the table and starts working on the circuit that is neatly hidden from plain view inside the box. After fixing the machine, she asks a volunteer to place her palm at a few centimetres distance from a tiny sensor bulb. On doing this, a sanitary napkin pops out of the box. “We are designing a device which does not require putting in coins to extract the product. This is because our mandate is to place it in low resource settings,” Ms. Manisha explains.
