Kerala Becomes India's First State to Make Robotics Education Compulsory for All Class 10 Students

Kerala became the first state in India to implement robotics education as a mandatory subject for all Class 10 students from June 2, 2025. Under the sixth chapter of the ICT textbook titled "The World of Robots," the syllabus teaches students the fundamentals of robotics through practical experiments such as building circuits, sensor work, and computer programming.

In a first-of-its-kind initiative, Kerala has become India's first state to make it compulsory for all 4.3 lakh class 10 students to study robotics from next academic year on June 2.

The placement of robotics in the tenth-grade ICT textbook, that is the sixth chapter entitled "The World of Robots" in the first book, will make the students better positioned to understand basic concepts of robotics from interactive activities, an official report reported on Sunday.

These are circuit manufacturing, aided by sensors and actuators, and electronic device actuation through computer programming, according to K Anvar Sadath, CEO, KITE and Chairman, ICT Textbook Committee, in a release.

KITE is the technical arm of the General Education Department of the Kerala state government.

It has already provided 29,000 robot kits to high schools in the state to facilitate the simple deployment of this curriculum.

"This ambitious effort is a sequel to Kerala's earlier record of introducing the learning of Artificial Intelligence (AI) among all seventh-grade students, another first at the national level last year," Sadath elaborated.

Supplementing an ongoing focus on skills-proof in future, the learning of AI has now also been added to the ICT books of classes 8, 9, and 10 as well.

The piloting of the robotics curriculum through experimentation with the Little KITEs (Kerala's IT club students) has helped to direct this bulk rollout to all class 10 students, the statement added.

The initial practical exercise in the book asks the students to use parts from available robotic kits like Arduino breadboards, IR sensors, servo motors, and jumper wires to build an automatic sanitiser dispenser that turns on automatically as soon as it senses a hand, it stated.

The students will further learn to develop AI-driven smart home automation systems, which include face-recognition-based smart doors.

In order to make all of this possible, they will make use of the 'Face Detection Built-in Model' of the Pictoblocks software programming IDE, using laptop webcams and Arduino kits that are available from KITE, in order to program door-openers.

KITE's new way of teaching robotics is aimed at enabling students to make use of advanced technologies to address a broad variety of real-world problems.

KITE has already completed training on the new ICT textbook of tenth grade for 9,924 teachers in the first phase.

Special robotics training for teachers will be conducted in July, Sadath informed.

In addition to this, KITE will give additional robotic kits and support to unaided schools according to the state syllabus if required.

The ICT textbook is also being distributed to all Malayalam, English, Tamil, and Kannada medium students, the official added later