IIT Palakkad beckons public with ‘open house’

IIT Palakkad's Nila campus opens to the public for annual open house, featuring science and technology exhibits and workshops.

Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Palakkad threw open its Nila campus at Kanjikode for the public on Saturday as part of celebrating its annual open house. The two-day open house is attracting school students in groups.

The event named Petrichor also marked the annual techno-cultural festival of the institute. Although it was proclaimed as an occasion for students aspiring to join IIT Palakkad to experience the institute’s dynamic environment first-hand, the scorching sun and lack of proper guidance through the campus could leave a visitor in the lurch.

IIT officials said that they expected about 5,000 people, mostly students from Kerala and Tamil Nadu, to visit the campus on Saturday and Sunday.

The visitors entering the campus were welcomed by a row of stalls displaying various segments of science and technology. The stalls were manned by different departments of IIT as well as the start-ups supported by the institution.

The students and researchers at the stalls demonstrated the working of some innovative projects. While some explanations were in lucid and comprehensible language, some others in jargon-filled language left the visitor confused.

A stall put up by the Department of Chemistry offered a live demo of chemical changes taking place in water at different levels, as well as some funny techniques involving simple chemistry. Meanwhile, the Humanities wing surprised the visitors with a question: ‘How fair has the society been to you?’ Surprisingly, majority opted ‘unfair’.

The festivities marked seven workshops, 15 technical sessions, and 19 cultural programmes. The workshops were on product design, artificial intelligence, reinforcement learning, robotics, competitive programming, and start-up and entrepreneurship.