THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: How would a newspaper based in Thiruvananthapuram’s Nedumangad report the dropping of atom bomb in Hiroshima in 1945. Curious enough? This intriguing thought arose in the minds of a few teachers in Government Vocational Higher Secondary School at Mancha, Nedumangad, who presented it to their students.
What would have ended as a usual speech in the morning assembly transformed into an interesting yet socially relevant activity for teenage students, who blended their teachers’ idea with their skills in modern tech, including AI. Together, they prepared a newspaper ‘Manchanathi’ using their computer labs and creative minds, and launched it on Hiroshima Day, August 6.
School headmaster Satheesh S M and Social Science teacher Udayakumar said that they gave an idea thread for the newspaper and overall monitoring, while the rest was worked upon by the students themselves. “The Indian Mulberry or ‘Manjanathi’ as it is called in this region, is found more in the Nedumangad region.
Tweaking it a little to incorporate our school’s location ‘Mancha’, we titled our newspaper as ‘Manchanathi,” he said. We have also tried to incorporate advertisements of fake companies that worked in and around Nedumangad to bring in more originality, he added.
Calling the atom bomb a ‘new discovery’ and ‘the most lethal weapon the world has ever seen’, the newspaper also included the opinion of the scientific community as a ‘dangerous turn’. The report also states how the ‘Little Boy’ bomb, which weighs only about four tonnes, had the potency of 20,000 tonnes of TNT and destroyed almost 70% of a city.
The ‘teen editors’, under the supervision of their teachers, have also incorporated how countries including Britain, the Soviet Union and China responded. The newspaper also includes AI-generated images of the mushroom-shaped smoke fumes, and that of Winston Churchill, Harry S Truman and Joseph Stalin sitting together in the Potsdam Conference during World War II.
“We initially planned to bring it out as a handwritten newspaper, but it lacked the original feel of a newspaper when we reached the final stage, so we decided to switch to AI. With some AI-generated photos and some basic work we did on Photoshop, we released the newspaper on the Hiroshima Day itself,” said Ivanah Wesley, a tenth-grader who was part of the team.