Festival

Nourishing the Scientific Minds of Tomorrow

Naziba Basher

“Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science”
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

With sayings like that in mind, the Holy Cross College Science Club hosted the 'Pran Frooto 10th Inter College Science Festival, 2012' held at Holy Cross College along with moderator, Indrajit Dutta. This year's science festival's theme was 'In Science, The Wise Ask The Whys!'

The inaugural ceremony started at 9:30 am on September 22, 2012. The ceremony was inaugurated by Dr Ishtiaque Mahmud, Former Head of Department of Bio-Chemistry, University of Dhaka. The chief and special guests were Munir Hassan, General Secretary, Math Olympiad Committee, Professor Nazma Hoque and Nishat Mazumder respectively. In total, 24 colleges took part in this festival with around one thousand participants. The different categories of the festival included Science, Psychology and Geography.

The winners of the Science Festival. Courtesy: Holy Cross College Science Club.

The three day event was divided with different sets of activities for each day. Though the registration started on September 17, the festival began on September 20 at 7:30 am in the morning with the project and wall magazine setup followed by the display of the outcome. The project categories were Physics (Fire fighting robot, Air car, Biosoundology), IT (Discover Bangladesh, Holy Cross College Science Club web), Biology (Green Chemistry), Chemistry (Preserving food with healthy preservative and process of radiation, Electricity from sea water), Geography (Green house effect in Bangladesh) and Psychology (Suicidal ideation causes and prevention, Intelligence test block design). From 12:00 pm onwards, the preliminary quizzes began followed by a lunch break. The afternoon consisted of the Green Olympiad, Math Olympiad, Science Olympiad and the day ended with an Astro-Physics Olympiad at 5:45 in the afternoon.

The second day, September 21, started off with the wall magazine display and lead on to the judging of the quizzes and Olympiads of the first day. During noon, a game of Sudoku was played by the contestants. After lunch, there was a project display and extempore speeches. At 3:00 pm, the final round of quiz took place. The extempore speeches were supervised by Dr Abdur Nur Tushar while the quizes were supervised by Ferdous Bappi.

The guests handing out crests.

On September 22, the third day, after the project and wall magazine display, the closing ceremony took place at 10:00 am which continued until 12:00 pm. The guests at the closing ceremony were Asaduzzaman Noor, MP, Managing Director, Desh TV, Dr Muhammed Zafar Iqbal, Professor of Department of EEE, Shahjalal University of Science and Technology and Dr A R Khan, Former Professor of Astro-Physics. Dr Muhammad Zafar Iqbal, in his speech at the closing ceremony, mentioned that if any of the students decide to do some scientific research, he would enable them to post it at a new website that he will be opening for science lovers. Prizes were handed out to the winning participants and crests were given out to the club officials for hosting a wonderful event.

The sponsors and media partners of the event were Pran Frooto, Desh TV, The Daily Star and Radio Foorti.

DID YOU KNOW?

Shintaro Ishihara

Japanese Author and Politician Shintaro Ishihara was born on September, 30, 1932 (today is his 80th birthday!). His father Kiyoshi was an employee, later a general manager of a shipping company. Shintaro grew up in Zushi, Kanagawa. In 1952, he entered Hitotsubashi University, and graduated in 1956. Just two months before graduation, Ishihara won the Akutagawa Prize (Japan's most prestigious literary prize) for the novel Season of the Sun. In the early 1960s, he concentrated on writing, including plays, novels, and a musical version of Treasure Island. One of his later novels, Lost Country, speculated about Japan under the control of the Soviet Union. He also ran a theatre company, and found time to visit the North Pole, race his yacht The Contessa and crossed South America on a motorcycle. He wrote a memoir of the journey, Nanbei Odan Ichiman Kiro. From 1966 to 1967, he covered the Vietnam War at the request of Yomiuri Shimbun. The experience influenced his decision to enter politics.

Information Source: Internet