Kanpur, February 20: It is time for IITians to put on their thinking caps and scratch their brains as much as they can. Reason: Techkriti, the biggest science and technology festival of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IIT-K) will start from Thursday.

It is known that Techkriti is comprised of series of competitions from diverse technical fields, but this time, the number of events and the level has been raised a bit to test the ‘brains’ of future engineers.

To name a few, Techkriti has competitions like ‘Endeavour-The Open Hardware Contest’, ‘Software Corner- A programming paradise’, ‘ECDC- The Electronic Gadget-making competition’, ‘Robogames- All about Robots’, ‘Eureka- The Paper Presentation Contest’, ‘Olymbiz- A dive into business world’ and the list goes on, touching the most diverse fields ranging from hardware to the world of stars.

Dean of Students’ Affairs, Prawal Sinha, said that IITians continue the trend of innovating things by adding the event ‘Pendrive’ which is about writing science fictions, poetry and hoaxes. Yet another interesting event will be Roboshow, during which a robotics team from the National University of Singapore (NUS) will demonstrate their eight award winning robots.

On the issue of participation in the festival, he said that there would be 1000 participants from all over the country while the number of participants for the online contests would be around 8000. “Online contestants include students from UK, USA, Singapore, Middle East and other countries, while it will be the first time when a team from Nepal will be participating in the festival,” he added.

Giving information on sponsors, Sinha said that Google and Adobe are the main sponsors of the event.

Festival chairman Rajat Moona said that one of the major attractions will be a lecture on ‘Hacking’ by Ankit Fadia, one of the most popular hacking wizards and recipient of several awards like Microsoft Valuable Professional and Limca Book’s ‘Indian person of the year-2002’. Interestingly, Fadia is the writer of the book ‘The Unofficial Guide to Ethical Hacking’. There would also be a talk on ‘Improving your Memory’ by World Memory record holder Krishnan Chahal.

Moona informed that the Break-Free workshop is about having a date with oneself, knocking on the door of your-self and searching for a leader living within. It is a chance to discover individual gifts and abilities, probing one’s personal beliefs and their influence on one’s action, along with influence on others.

Other workshops include astro-photography, telescope making workshop and others.