Mangalore, Feb 18:  'Last Word' the much availted panel discussion was the highlight of the fourth day of Engineer 2008 in NITK. It was a rare opportunity for the students who stormed into the auditorium to listen to eminent personalities like the Lead India Winner R K Mishra, CNN-IBN Correspondent Pallavi Ghosh, Founder of National Institute of Design Prof S Balaram, Joint Secretary of MHRD Subhash C Khuntia, journalist Ajay Upadhyay and HR Manager of ITC Ltd L Prabhakaran.

The topic of dicussion was social responsibility issues in the corporate and public sector and every member of the panel expressed their opinion on the issue followed by an interactive session with the students who had questions in galore.
The events of day 3 included 'Automata,' 'Velocity,' 'Click,' 'Ad-Venture' and 'Fox Hunt.'

Automata, a robotics event, expected the teams to come up with a fully automated robot that can scan and check errors on a chessboard pattern. Another robotics event Velocity pushed the participating robots to their tether while they zipped, remote controlled, through a race track modelled on formula racing. 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.

Click!, a workshop for photography enthusiasts was conducted by Jayanth Sharma of the Bangalore Photography Club and Venkatesh, both expert wildlife photographers. The participants were educated on the fine nuances involved in all stages of photography. Ad-Venture judged the business acumen of the youth, wherein the teams were asked to design a campaign for a leading sports gear company, keeping in mind  the competing company's sales being higher due to an aggressive campaign.

Fox Hunt was an amateur HAM radio enthusiast's key event  which was a quest to find the fox for which they were trained in a workshop. The team had to locate the fox using the technique which was a beacon located at a remote location.

There was a guest lecture by Dr Tim Poston, Ashutosh Mukherjee, Professor at NIAS (National Institute Advanced Studies), Bangalore on the contributions of acclaimed genius Alan Turing to the field of science and mathematics. Vice President of Robert Bosch Group R K Shenoy gave the audience a taste of advanced automotive technology in his talk on the role of Electronics in the Automotive Industry.

The fest also features a three day exhibition conducted by ISRO, which displays the technological advances of the Indian space community. On the show are models of various satellites, transponders and information pertaining to the Indian space age.

DHNS