The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Day Three of Shaastra: ingenius ideas abound

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Sunday, Oct 07, 2007
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Day Three of Shaastra: ingenius ideas abound

Zubeda Hamid

— PHOTO: K.V. SRINIVASAN

DREAM MACHINE: Students building a vehicle for a contest held as part of ‘Shaastra 2007’ at IIT-Madras in Chennai on Saturday.

CHENNAI: It was hard to imagine that anything in IIT Madras’s junkyard could actually be used. Backless chairs, mangled wheelbarrows and broken tube lights littered the area. Among the rubbish the organisers of ‘Junkyard Wars’ had scattered useful items: tyres (second hand) and metal rods. It was up to the six teams that qualified from over 400 to wade through the junk and look for things that would help build a vehicle.

‘Junkyard Wars’, one of the many competitions on Day Three of ‘Shaastra’, IIT Madras’s annual inter-collegiate technical festival, involved teams putting together a vehicle that could be manually operated. Once ready, the vehicles with the riders would have to pass under a stick held at three feet, navigate six turns and ride through a 50-metre course of road and sand.

“It wasn’t that difficult. We are used to this in college,” said G. Susheel, a student of BITS-Pilani, whose team has been working on the vehicle since Friday morning. Since the organisers supplied the teams with a moped engine, it was not very difficult, other students said. Finding the smaller part needed though, was a challenge, another team member A. Jaideep added.

Another event, ‘Master Builder’, saw students putting together a transmission line tower with sections of aluminium. Built over two-and-a-half days, the towers will be tested for both strength and cost-effectiveness.

“We received about 25 designs and selected the best 10 for the competition,” a ‘Shaastra’ volunteer said.

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