Pragyan 2011: Fiesta for the techies

Updated on: Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Engineers are made of many parts — a truth that emerges at technical fests!

The annual techno-management festival of the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchi (NIT-T), ‘Pragyan 2011' had engineering students from institutions across the country assuming various avatars, and how! The hosts and their guests revelled in role play, shuffling hats as stock brokers, crime sleuths, film makers, environmentalists and even record makers in more than 40 events from February 17 to 20.

Record-setting feat

The plethora of lectures, workshops, exhibitions, contests and infotainment triggered off the technical expertise and ingenuity of the young techies. Pragyan, this year featured a jubilant denouement with a shot at making it to the Guinness Book of World Records. Day 3 of the fest saw students join hands with school kids in an attempt to set the record for the most number of people solving a Rubik's Cube together. Three hundred students solved the Rubik's cube in 12 minutes in an attempt to better the existing world record set by 134 school boys from Dr. Challoner's Grammar School, Amersham, England, who solved the Rubik's cube in 12 minutes in March 2010. The India Book of Records acknowledged the fact, while the Guinness is yet to. Pragyan Cube Open, a first-time event had participants vying for the title of the ‘Fastest Cuber'.

Contests

Have ecological concerns to be addressed in your campus? Debating the best way to find a solution? Design a contest and invite some of the best minds in the nation to solve the problems in your backyard. That's exactly what ‘GreeNITT' did, setting contestants the task of coming up with creative solutions for the environment problems at the campus. Technical contests like ‘Delta T' challenged participants to build working models of a heat exchanger sans electricity, while ‘Liminality', the digital art contest put to test the artistic and technical flair of budding graphic designers. While speed racing event, ‘Nittro', had teams racing self-built miniature cars equipped with petrol and diesel engines in a custom made track, ‘Sky dive', a plane modelling contest saw airplanes zooming across the field. ‘Sanrachna', ‘Junkyard wars' and ‘contraptions' resulted in a profusion of models built from scrap material and utility everyday objects.

A gamut of events allowed techies to strip off their everyday garb. In ‘Dalal Street', a virtual stock trading game, participants experienced the adrenaline rush of a stock market. Crime Busters, dubbed as an original Pragyan event, had contestants racing against time, to solve a fictional murder mystery. In ‘Take One', a short film making contest, participants had to work their magic on celluloid from a choice of three film making genres.

Workshops

‘Pengufest', an event organised by GNU/Linux Users Group, Tiruchi (GLUG-T), had hackers going gaga over hackathons and unconferences. Workshops on astronomy, robotics, haptics (the science of applying touch sensation and control for interaction with virtual or physical applications) provided ample fodder for thought. ‘Crossfire- an interactive panel discussion', one of the star events of the fest, had panellists debating on the ‘changing priorities of youth' with the discussion ranging from Facebook to live-in relationships. The panellists included Narayanan Krishnan, the only Indian to make it to the Top 10 CNN heroes of the year, international speaker, Farida Rasulzada, novelist Padma Venkatraman, and Shruti Kohli, Founder-editor of Money Quinn, among others.

When engineers let down their hair to jive and jig, they cannot help but blend technical wizardry to entertainment. The ‘Reactable', that combined digital effects processing and multitouch technology with DJ-ing had students swinging to popular and international music. It was music with a message delivered by ‘Solar Punch', a New York-based musical band using only solar powered instruments on the opening day of the fest.

Pragyan 2011 was inaugurated by Dr. Paul S Dev, Founder president of U.S. based D-Star Engineering Corporation, which specialises in compact, light- weight, heavy-fuel propulsion and power systems, currently funded by the U.S.Army, DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency), and Office of Naval Research. Stefan Engeseth, CEO of detective marketing and creative business thinker, and Prafulla Agnihotri, Director of IIM, Tiruchi, graced the valediction. The convener, G. Kannabiran, announced that Pragyan would attempt to attain an ISO certification this year.

Pragyan 2011: Fiesta for the techies

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