Parul University Hosts Kendriya Vidyalaya Students for a DICE-SIC Idea-Creation Field Visit via PIERC!
- • What the visit was, and which schools took part.
- • The DICE and School Innovation Council initiative behind it.
- • The idea-creation techniques the students were taught and made to use.
- • The six innovation facilities they toured, and what each one is for.
9 October 2026
Parul University campus, Vadodara
2 Kendriya Vidyalaya schools
KV No. 2 Army Baroda and KV No. 3 AFS Baroda
6 facilities toured
Labs plus the PIERC Incubation Centre
What the field visit was
On 9 October 2026, the Parul Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research Centre (PIERC) hosted students from Kendriya Vidyalaya No. 2 Army Baroda and Kendriya Vidyalaya No. 3 AFS Baroda for a day on campus. The visit ran as Activity 2, Idea Creation through Field Visit. The aim was simple: take school students out of the classroom and show them, in the university’s labs and incubation centre, how an idea becomes a product.
The DICE and School Innovation Council initiative
The visit sits under the Developing Innovation Culture and Entrepreneurship initiative, known as DICE, which reaches schools through the School Innovation Councils set up by the Ministry of Education, Government of India. DICE works at the school level; the innovation councils are the channel it runs through. A field visit complements that work by showing students something a textbook rarely does, the process by which an idea is turned into a product and a business.
The idea-creation session
The morning was a working session, not a lecture. Students were walked through a set of methods and then made to use them, posing real problems, generating ideas around them, and testing those ideas against a short set of questions.
| Technique | What it does |
|---|---|
| Brainstorming | Generate as many ideas as possible before judging any of them |
| Mind mapping | Lay a problem out visually and see how its parts connect |
| SCAMPER | Reshape an existing idea by questioning it, substitute, combine, adapt and so on |
| Idea validation (DFV) | Test an idea for Desirability (is it wanted), Feasibility (can it be built with what is at hand) and Viability (will it work as a venture) |
For a school audience, the point was less the vocabulary than the habit. A student who has once tested an idea against those three questions is more likely to do it again, in school and later in their own work.
The labs they toured
After the session, the students toured the university’s innovation facilities. The sequence is the lesson. Many students know AR, VR and AI from games and apps; a lab shows the same things being built and tested. The IDEA Lab, the robotics labs and the Fab Lab are where an idea becomes a physical prototype, and the incubation centre is where a prototype is pushed toward becoming a venture.
Facility
What happens there
AR and VR Labs
Build and test augmented and virtual reality, past the gaming most students already know
AI and ML Labs
See machine learning find patterns in data, hands-on
AICTE IDEA Lab
Prototype and tinker in an AICTE-supported innovation space
Robotics and Automation Labs
Work with systems that sense and act
Fab Lab
Turn a design into a physical prototype through digital fabrication
PIERC Incubation Centre
Where a prototype is taken forward toward a product or venture
Having all of it on one campus let the students follow a single idea from a sticky note to a tested object, which was the point the visit set out to make.
Why it matters
A field visit is a small thing on its own. Its value is timing: reaching students while they are young enough for the exposure to shape what they believe they can do. For the university, opening PIERC and the labs to schoolchildren is also a plain statement of what it offers its own students, an innovation ecosystem where the whole path from idea to startup sits in one place.
SOURCE AND CONTEXT. Based on PIERC’s report of the Idea Creation through Field Visit activity at Parul University, 9 October 2026, held under the DICE and School Innovation Council initiative of the Ministry of Education. The source names no individual participants and carries no quotations, so none are reproduced here. The AICTE IDEA Lab, Ministry of Education and PIERC links are to the respective official pages.
People and organisations
- PIERC Parul Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research Centre; organiser and host
- Ministry of Education, Government of India Runs the DICE initiative and the School Innovation Councils
- AICTE IDEA Lab AICTE-supported innovation lab scheme; one of the facilities toured
- Kendriya Vidyalaya No. 2 Army Baroda Visiting school
- Kendriya Vidyalaya No. 3 AFS Baroda Visiting school
- Parul University Host; Vadodara, Gujarat
