Tech meets creativity at IIT Delhi

In a relentless pursuit of innovative pedagogy, a professor from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) at IIT Delhi has taken a new step in transforming technical education by marrying technical papers with art forms. Prof R Lakshmi Narayan from the DMSE conducted an experiment with his third-year undergraduate students by dividing them into six teams of six members each. Each team was required to read a technical paper from the journal, Acta Materialia, and explain it using art forms like plays, music, interpretative dance shows, memes etc.

His recent initiative, combining art, technology, and soft skills, builds on a series of experiments aimed at infusing vitality into the traditionally perceived ‘research-heavy’ field of Materials Engineering. “This unlocks a creative mindset more easily than routine training. I was amazed to see that each team produced a technically brilliant performance and developed songs as well. The added advantage of this is that these performances cannot be plagiarised or generated by ChatGPT,” said Prof Narayan.

Importantly, these performances were made a part of the course curriculum and students were scored out of 20, which were then added to the grades for the course ‘Mechanical Behaviour of Materials’.

The main challenge in imparting technical education in fields like Materials Engineering is to sustain interest in academics. “Materials Science is more than just equations and formulas. It involves understanding materials as if they have character, much like human beings. To convey this essence, I previously tasked my students with choosing any topic and performing based on it. The idea was to humanize materials and make the subject matter more relatable,” explained Prof Narayan.