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Insight is a workshop organized by Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Anna University Chennai to popularize Indian Science to school students. This workshop is an initiative started by Prof. Ranjani Parthasarathy, Prof. TV Geetha and  Ms. Bama from DCSE. Its an excellent initiative started in 1999 and successfully going on for a decade. Year after year, mam has been inspiring students and exposing us to various aspects of Indian Sciences. This includes Indian Mathematics, Astronomy, Logic and a lot more. Usually, students used to send mail to schools and request them to send their students to attend the workshop. This year it has been radical. DCSE collaborated with Science City and has organized this workshop on a grand scale. Science City has taken care of all the logistics and their efforts has fetched a huge participation from students. This year’s Insight had 130 participants in its first day of workshop - a massive outcome. Students had a fantastic day learning a lot of new stuffs. I am one of the speakers in the workshop. I had an excellent time too. Interacting with school students and watching their actions and behaviour reminded me of my school days when I attended such workshops. What was most nostalgic was the parents leaving their wards in the workshop and staying outside the auditorium for about half an hour and watching thier child listen to the workshop. This reminded of my parents who used to do exactly the same. What was a little new to us was 8th class students playing with their cell phones. This is one thing thats really new to me. I think as time progresses, schools will start proving Cell Phones to students with their ID cards :D.

More than just this three day workshop, there’s another exclusive workshop for students from rural background. Students from various districts in Tamil Nadu are coming all their way to Chennai to attend this workshop. This extravaganza will take place between May 27th to May 29th. Sadly I’ll not be able to be a part of this edition of the workshop because I’m going to IIT Delhi for my internship.

All the Insight material is available online in our website - http://cs.annauniv.edu/insight/index.htm. They are such invaluable information which you can never get anywhere. Such a cornucopia of information is very hard to get elsewhere. You have a glimpse of this Day 1 of the workshop in my picassa web albums - http://picasaweb.google.com/dayanandasaraswati/Insight09Day1