IIT Techfest 2008: Geekiness Galore

So Techfest 2008 came, rocked, and went. If you had any geekiness in you, here’s where you should have let it loose. We experienced firsthand what it feels like to see what geeks are made of. It true Tech2 fashion, we bring you some glimpses of the technology festival.

We went around checking out some of the cool competitions, spoke to some participants, and even grilled some of them.

Students of GCET

Wings, an RC (remote controlled) glider competition, happened to attract quite a lot of curiosity. The rules were simple – build your own plane, then show if it can fly, or glide rather. Interestingly, we learnt 55 (out of 150) participants tried to smuggle ready-made RC planes without any luck.

We spoke to some of the guys who made it through the eliminations (none from Mumbai though), and trust me, some serious planning was involved. Some, like the boys from GCET (G.H. Patel College of Engineering and Technology), Gujarat, managed to complete the plane in three days, some like the duo behind the set of wings that came first called “Lazy Bird”, underwent months of sleepless nights.

According to Chintan Modi and Gaurang, M.Tech students from NITK, Surathkal in Karnataka, they used Gyros to tackle gusty wind that made the plane to maintain a length of flight of 25.4 seconds. Cool, huh? Well, there is something cooler than this.

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Vishan Popat, a 13-year-old student of Navrachana school, Baroda, happened to be the youngest participant in Wings. Apart from building a plane, he also managed to put together a contraption he called the “Solar Updraft Tower”. Snobbish, huh? Not really! It’s a small plant that can make electricity, capable of making 0.5W/M2 of it, as part of another competition called “My Innovision”.

Prison Break

And if you are wondering, yes, we also caught some cool robotics action in a competition called Prison Break. It’s a bit strange to find a whole lot of people building machines that can propel themselves out of the prison box. But the gadgetry involved made us happy, so there!

Tech2 Gaming Zone

Maybe you should have junked that PS3 controller and come down to IIT. And hey, they had a Gaming Lounge too, with loads of games, multiplayer etc. Naturally, the Tech2 zone provided some live action on the PS3 and the Wii.

For more tongue-in-cheek stories on the event, go here!