Last Friday, 13th October 2023, I went into the first day of the KolpoKoushol workshop with excitement and an open mind, yet a touch of apprehension was poking my head. The organizers of KolpoKoushol Cohort 2023 organized the workshop after almost 8 years, in collaboration with Kickstarter, Universal Machine, a2i Bangladesh. The KolpoKoushol is an initiative undertaken by MIT and Harvard students and alumni “to engage with young minds in Bangladesh to inspire them, help them come up with new ideas, and make those ideas some sort of reality in a few days for a demo and later go on with the idea,” aiming to bridge the gaps between traditional disciplines and to encourage its participants to solve local and community-specific problems!
When I entered the venue, the room was mostly full of unfamiliar faces, with a few familiar ones. Once everyone showed up, we gathered together and introduced ourselves. During that meet and greet moment, I realized how diverse backgrounds the attendees were from and how diverse the thoughts they would bring to this workshop. There were ongoing engineering students, full-time engineers, ongoing business students, full-time business people, designers, music artists, architects, entrepreneurs etc. That is one key part of such a multidisciplinary environment – you get to interact with a lot of people from entirely different backgrounds or thought processes from yours, who are pushing themselves to go beyond their comfort zones, and you will get to know different things from each other.
A little while later, Nazmus Saquib, a graduate and PhD student of MIT Media Lab, a visionary behind this initiative, currently the CTO of Creative Crowdfunding Protocol PBC, CCP (an Andreessen Horowitz-funded startup and a subsidiary organization of Kickstarter), founder of a tech venture studio (Universal Machine Inc.), and an author (Mathematica Data Visualization, 2014), graciously led us through the program, why they initiated this program and workshop, what they expect from the participants and shared the outline of our activities for the four-day workshop. We also got a glimpse idea how Nazmus Saquib created the electric ektara (an electric version of a Bengali instrument) for one of his projects. During his research period, he worked on a project named “SENSEI”, (Sensing Educational Interaction) is a dynamic range-based distributed sensor network that aids the observation process in early childhood Montessori classrooms.
Shortly after that, we commenced the first session of KolpoKoushol, which was about the Hardware and Documentation Processes. It was beautifully presented by Samiul Hoque, a hardware wizard and life-saviour hardware mentor for the participants. He shared how important it is to write down everything when we learn something new so that if we can’t remember something, we can just go through the documentation to find out the point easily. We also had a small discussion hour with Sameera H Wadood, a Culinary Consultant, about the diverse food of our country and how we can connect the food sector with technology and 3D food printing. Before that, we had a lab tour at IUB’s fabrication laboratory where we baked our ideas with different hardware machines, parts, circuits, and wires and learned how to use those machines to make a relationship between hardware and software together to give life to our idea.
Later on, all the participants paired up into small groups based on their field of interest and this year’s KolpoKoushol was designed to bring together domain experts from the fields of design and tech, food, music and arts, where everyone will work together with engineering students and professionals to build innovative projects! I chose music to come up with something different to implement and get a demo in 4 days with my group – where I was from business school, two of us were from engineering school (Tahshina Islam Munni and Shoumik), two of us from music (Shaibal) and design (Mushfique) background and one of us was from architecture background (Hiba Sharafuddin, also a guitarist). Before ending day 01, we discussed what could do and then we all agreed on our idea to create unique musical instruments and planned to research this topic to start our project from next day.
The first day of the workshop was packed with a lot of interesting and cool things going on, and I learned a bunch of new stuff that got me struck. I couldn’t quite remember it all by the time I returned but what really amazed me, being somewhat low-key, was how I started the conversation with people I didn’t know, and the first person I started talking with surprisingly happened to be my namesake (Zerin) and we both work in creative writing, marketing and had a great time making and sharing fun stories with almost everyone.
Zarin T. 