ITI youth’s science quest lands him at IIT lab where he develops spirograph ArtMath

The 25-year-old from Samdhi village in Banaskantha had completed his education from the Industrial Training Institute in 2017 and was working as an assembly worker with an automobile company at Vithalapur in Ahmedabad when his elder brother Sagar, who works as a security guard at IITGN, introduced him to CCL.

“Since I work at the institute and get to see the kind of work being done at CCL, I showed Rahul some of the videos. He got excited and asked me to take him there once,” Sagar told The Indian Express. When Rahul first visited the lab, he was amazed by the fascinating STEM models. Soon, he started frequenting the place. He quit his job and started living with his elder brother in Palaj, a small village near IITGN campus, and started working at a local mechanical shop repairing scooters and motorbikes.

His interest in Science and the quest for learning something new brought him as a team member at the IITGN.
Prajapati worked only 10 days on the spirograph that is named ArtMath. After failing twice, he succeeded in making the spirograph. It all started from finding a scrap bicycle from the CCL auditorium. “During the process; he tweaked designs and constantly improved through trial and error. More importantly, he tried despite failing.

He encountered a lot of challenges, but made it through. When Rahul came here he didn’t know how to run a computer. Now he knows laser machines, 3D printing and a range of heavy duty tools. The spirograph has the enriching capacity to produce patterns without a computer,” said CCL co-ordinator Prof Manish Jain who started the lab.

The machine has two wheels rotating at different speeds to create different patterns, Prajapati explained. “It is a four-bar mechanism. The number of petals/lobes of these patterns and the number of turns of the wheel to create them can be calculated from the number of teeth on the two cogs. This spirograph has an inner disk with 18 teeth and an outer wheel with 48. The inner cog will thus rotate around three times to create petals with patterns.”

Coupled with a GeoGebra application, the CCL team showed him how some beautiful visualisations could be created by changing gear ratios of the bicycle. Now, Rahul wishes to develop this machine into a more versatile manner using a geared cycle, says Jay Thakkar, who completed his post graduation from IIT Kharagpur in 2015 and is the team lead at CCL. He showed him a few photographs for a reference.

“CCL is certainly better than his previous jobs. Here, he gets to learn different new things but in the automobile company he was doing only one,” says Sagar with beaming eyes. Rahul’s impressive performance got him hired as an intern at CCL with a stipend of Rs 25,000 – Rs 7,000 more than what he was getting in his last job. He can be hired at the lab for two years after a six month review.

According to Prof Jain, Prajapati came with a completely new perspective. “Students coming from humble backgrounds often miss out on the opportunities to showcase their work on big platforms. But with a conducive atmosphere, their hands create magic. As much as this is the story of Rahul, this is also a testament that the right environment can turn something ordinary into extraordinary,” Prof Jain adds.