Nepal’s public education has a somewhat dubious history. Over the course of more than a century it has seen a rapid growth playing an instrumental role in bringing about changes in the sociopolitical arena. However, its qualitative aspect has always been questioned while its quantitative aspect has been somewhat appreciated. In order to enhance the quality of education, especially in the last two decades, ICT, Information and Communication Technology, has been looked into as one of the potential elements in bringing about much needed qualitative improvement in Nepal’s education system. As a result, attempts have been made to make use of ICT in its public education system from both government and non-governmental agencies. This paper tries to understand historical development of ICT, public education system and attempts being made to integrate ICT in public education.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), around 1 billion of the world’s population, i.e., around 15% of all people, live with some form of disability. In Nepal, around 2% of the total population has some kind of disability. Most of the disabled population is of a low socioeconomic status. However, the generic studies and surveys that exist are largely varied and are likely to be inaccurate. Person with Disabilities (PwD) face utter challenges and difficulties in areas from their normal livelihood to employment opportunities. Various organizations and activists have been working toward raising the socioeconomic status and quality of life of PwD. With the advent of new technologies, especially in Information and Communications Technology (ICT), that promote accessibility via different assistive devices, the possibility of inclusion of PwD in education and employment has become apparent and many organizations throughout the world have become inclusive. The potential of ICT to transform the lives of PwD should be addressed by the government and other organizations working for the benefit of PwD by formulating and implementing the policies. This paper analyzes various aspects on Disability, Employment, the Role of ICT, and Accessibility to Empower the Life of PwD in Nepal.

Maze solving, based on the concept of path finding and AI agent movement, has numerous solving techniques and approaches. This paper aims to propose, implement and empirically assess a unique mixed model approach to solve maze image uploaded by the user, and intends to show that the approach is feasible and effective. The mixed model implementation involves anomaly tolerant dead end filling using image processing followed A*. Along with the primary aim of empirically assessing mixed maze solving approach, this paper also aims to introduce distortion/anomaly tolerant version of dead end filling algorithm and show its usage in maze solving. The maze image uploaded by the user is first digitized and preprocessed, and is then solved using mixed model implementation. The overall system performance is tested using 10 different maze images of varied sizes, shape and number of dead ends. With a size of 733 x 700 pixels and 179 dead ends, a maximum total time of 34.151 seconds is obtained. Moreover, the correlations of image properties with proposed model components are also evaluated. It is observed that the approach works with various maze shapes provided they have only two openings, at the edge, and are infected by only salt and pepper noise, if any; hence, the proposed model for maze solving is generic and practical with some limitations.

Character recognition is commonly referred to as Optical Character Recognition as it deals with the recognition of optically processed characters. With the advent of digital optical scanners, a lot of paper- based books, textbooks, magazines, articles, and documents are being transformed into an electronic version that can be manipulated by a computer. OCR is an instance of off-line character recognition, where the system recognizes the fixed static shape of the character. This paper focuses on character recognition of printed text in Nepali script. This work analyzes the efficiency of Nepalese OCR based on Tesseract engine. The benchmark of this investigation and analysis is to create the dataset of the 69 different fonts with the 2,484 samples of consonants data of Nepali script. The overall accuracy of 96% was obtained in the training phase and 69% in the testing phase.

The pedagogical approaches in this 21 st century world have been modified in many ways with the rapid advancements and innovations in science and technology. The modes of teaching and learning such as distance learning (DL), online learning (OL), and blended learning (BL) are some of the modalities that are becoming popular at present. For some years now, blended modality (BM) of learning is spreading out rapidly and widely as a new pedagogical approach. In recent years, the use of BM is gradually increasing in Nepalese educational institutions too. This study has made an attempt to explore the students’ perception towards blended modality of learning; and its benefits and challenges as a learning approach in the context of higher education in Nepal. Based on a survey- based questionnaire and semi-structured interview as research tools, it has been found in the study that the students had positive attitudes towards BM, and it was very useful to those learners in higher education, who needed to take family and job responsibilities together with their study. Besides, it was reported that though Internet connectivity was one of the main problems, the students were able to take the advantages of both F2F (face to face) and OL through BM.

FPGAs are an arrangement of gates that can be reprogrammed or reconfigured. In FPGA, Logic functions are usually implemented by Logic Blocks, Programmable Routing, and Input-output Blocks. FPGAs are more adaptable than ASICs but they are relatively larger in size, slower and consume more power because of routing which uses almost 90% of the overall area in FPGA. Our work explains detailed analysis of the existing techniques addressing different issues such as; routing, mapping, cluster, optimization, and energy efficiency related to FPGA power, speed delay and area density. By analyzing different FPGAs architecture techniques, we revealed that low power consumption and fast speed can be achieved by designing FPGA with large cluster size, however efficient area can be achieved by designing FPGA with small cluster size. Lookup table with four input gives most effective tradeoff between Power, speed and Area. This paper also suggests the latest area for optimizing the power, speed delay and area density for different FPGA architecture.