The Hindu : Karnataka News : Competitions, workshops on day three at NIT-K

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Sunday, Feb 17, 2008
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Karnataka

Competitions, workshops on day three at NIT-K

Staff Correspondent

The events put the creative skills of students to test

— Photo: R. Eswarraj

NEW FIELD: Students learning the process of taking fingerprints at the forensic workshop at ‘Engineer 2008’ at NIT-K, Surathkal near Mangalore, on Friday.

SURATHKAL: The cracks that began to emerge in some well-entrenched fallacies about engineers and engineering education grew bigger as “Engineer 2008” entered its penultimate day on Saturday. The four-day national-level, inter-collegiate competition being held at the National Institute of Technology - Karnataka, here, proved that engineering students need not grow up to be engineers. The competitions and workshops at the event showed that engineers can be dreamers, artists and poets too. Dharen Chadda, a brand consultant from Bangalore who addressed the students and judged an advertising competition, believes in the creative abilities of engineers and trashes suggestions that engineering education creates one-dimensional parochial individuals.

Impressed with the results of the advertising competition, Mr. Chadda said that the system of technical learning lent itself to practical creativity. Speaking to The Hindu on the sidelines of the event, he said that because of their structured education, engineers were able to come up with more coherent solutions to creative challenges that the advertising industry faced.

“Quite often, people from other streams lose sight of the ultimate objective of creativity in advertising and pursue creativity for its own sake. But these boys understand the problems and their solutions too well,” he said.

The forensics workshop held on Friday was followed by a competition on Saturday in which the engineering students were asked to solve a crime based on a given set of clues and a visit to a mock crime site.

B. Ashoka, member of the Indian Academy of Forensic Science, who delivered a lecture at Friday’s workshop, echoed Mr. Chadda when he said that engineers could make great forensic investigators. “Their logic-based learning makes it a natural progression,” he said. Similarly, a photography workshop conducted by Jayanth Sharma and Venkatesh, both experts in the field from Bangalore, went a step further to prove the versatility and the plethora of options before engineers.Robokrithi, a workshop on robotics held by Technophilia, had lectures on wired and wireless robots followed by a hands-on workshop-cum-competition on robot building. The day ended with a laser show, “Halo”. It was put up by Bangalore-based experts in the field.

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