IIT Madras gears up for Shaastra 2010

Shaastra, IIT Madras’ four-day, annual technical festival will be held from September 29, 2010 to October 3, 2010. The festival will include competitions, lectures and workshops and will attract over 30,000 students from around the country. Shaastra aims to showcase a budding engineer’s imaginative skills through various ‘Spirit of Engineering Projects’ that have been organised. Shaastra hopes to inspire young minds to explore the concept of Imagineering with IIT Madras. This will be carried out through various events, notably Shaastra Nights — a showcase of technical wizardry, a stunt show by radio controlled cars and an air show — an exhibition for model planes in the country.
In addition, Shaastra 2010 also presents TechX, a platform showcasing technical innovations right from industries and universities to grassroot innovators.

Shaastra Symposium: The symposium will explore the impact of technology on society through discussions on technology intervention and policy recommendations to improve technology in rural India. The symposium will include talks by well-known speakers and workshops that will help young engineers.

AGSTVC: The Al Gore Sustainability Venture Competition will be held as a part of Shaastra 2010.The competition aims to support innovative solutions provided by students on issues like climate change, sustainability, energy security and the environment.

Other events include the Toy Repair Bash — a massive repair campaign for techies, where faulty toys are collected from warehouses around the City. The repaired ones would be distributed to underprivileged kids through IIT’s NGO partners, Going Vernacular and Learn From Toys.

Put on your thinking cap
Shaastra will also host a range of ancillary events such as:

*Industry Defined Problems
*Robotics
*Da Vinci Machine
*Junkyard Wars
*Hackfest
*Paper presentations and the Shaastra quizzes (ShaastraMain Quiz, How Things Work, and the Shaastra Online quiz).
*Shaastra Unwind
*Puzzle Championship
*Science Fiction Writing
*Mensa IQ
Shaastra 2010 aims to address all aspects of science and technology. There’s Frugal and Online Programming Contest for coders, and Math Modelling and Chemical X for the pure science enthusiasts. Science Fiction Writing and Mensa are online contests.The workshops at Shaastra 2010 will be based on themes such as bio-mimicry, forensic science and astronomy. With all these exciting events brought under the common theme of ‘Imagineering’, Shaastra 2010 promises to be a technical extravaganza that one just cannot miss.