IIIT-H professor uses dice to develop dancing tool; earns rare patent

Time of India

25-07-2025

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Hyderabad: Roll the dice and learn a new dance form — be it Bharatanatyam or Freestyle. This effortless yet engaging concept of dance education is what has recently won Jayachandran Surendran, a lecturer at the International Institute of Information Technology - Hyderabad (IIIT-H), a rare patent in the field of arts.
Jayachandran secured the patent for, Atam, a teaching tool that he believes makes learning dance as intuitive as rolling dice. It was born out of the academic's 10-year-long urge to make dancing more appealing to students with no rhythm or prior training — and limited interest in some cases.
Dance postures on dice
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So how does Atam work? "It is a small rectangular box with dice and eight slots. Each of the six faces of every die displays a dance posture," explained Jayachandran.
"Students can roll one or two dice and practice whichever posture appears on the top face. The postures focus on lower body movements, giving individuals complete freedom to use their hands however they want," said the lecturer, who teaches dance at the Centre for Exact Humanities, IIIT-H.
Atam, he said, can be used to learn and practice postures, footwork variations, movement, and even body angles.
Initially the engineer-turned-dancer used to project dance postures on a screen for students to learn.
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"But it wasn't very interesting or engaging. I wanted students to interact and participate. So I developed this tool and the feedback has been great," he said.
Can learn all dance forms
Dwelling further into the process of developing it, Jayachandran explained how every dance style has some common fundamentals. "It's how students are taught general subjects until Class 10, regardless of their future career paths.
Same way, this tool allows us to teach a common foundation for all dance forms — basic movements that train both the body and the mind to stay open to diverse dance styles," said the 46-year-old who taught dance for nine years at Kalakshetra Foundation in Chennai before joining IIITH.
While designed for basic dance education for beginners, he said that the interchangeable dials of Atam make it suitable for intermediate and advanced learners as well.
But he never thought it would be so well received.
"Forget the patent, I wasn't even trying to design a tool. All I wanted was to make my class more interactive. I wasn't trying to turn someone into a dancer, but to provide dance literacy," said Jayachandran, who was awarded a PhD this month on form-neutral and style-neutral fundamentals of dance.
Niveditha Sathish, who has been using the tool since 2023 to teach students at Aham Divine Dance Foundation in Chennai, said, "I've tried this with all age groups, including non-dancers, and it's very engaging.
For example, in Bharatanatyam, there are 64 traditional adavus. But with Atam, I can teach an infinite number of combinations as every time I roll a die or change the dial direction, I get a new set."
Very rare feat
Those working in the intellectual property field confirmed it is very rare to get a patent in arts. "Mostly, they go for copyrights. For instruments, tools, or devices used for music, dance, or other art forms, a patent can be secured, but it is very rare as it has to be a genuine invention rather than a trivial modification of an existing device," said Raju Bhupathiraju, an intellectual property expert who has been in the field for the last 20 years.
The next step for Jayachandran is to develop an online tool based on Atam and make it available as an app.
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