School IT Fest begins

KAZHAKOOTAM: The tenth edition of the State School IT Fest began at Techopark here on Wednesday.  The event, conducted by the Education Department in association with IT@School, is attended by 289 students from across the state. For the first time in the history of the fest, nine students have been granted entry on the basis of appeal. The competitions started at 8.30 a.m. This time around, 10 events have been scheduled, with six falling in the HS section and four in the HSS section. The events comprising digital painting, IT project, multimedia presentation, IT quiz, Malayalam typing and web-page designing were conducted at four different venues. This is  the fifth consecutive time that the Technopark has been chosen as the venue of the IT fest. IT@School executive director K Anvar Sadath said that the fest was expected to provide knowledge on modern trends in IT to the young generation.‘’It will make the students accustomed to sophisticated technology and can provide impetus to the process of nurturing young technical experts in the state,’’ he said.  In the interactive session held in the afternoon, Satheesh Babu, director of ICFOSS, delivered a lecture on emerging  trends in mobile computing. Following this, Centre for Bioinformatics honorary director Achutshankar S Nair led the interactive session on ‘green computing.’ IT@School project was started in schools to impart hands-on information  to students on ICT (Information and Communication Technology). The fest, which began in 2003, aims at providing a platform to the students to showcase their talents in Information Technology.