Challenges and competitions foster creative skills, individual and collective ambitious goals among the participants that must self-assemble, find other individuals to fill out missing expertise, and deepens technical and societal ambitions in the young mind. It allows development of novel new approaches and fosters organizational and working-together skills, and enables development of diverse technical pursuits and expertise in the individual. Hitkarini High School in Jabalpur in 1930s and early 1940s is where Sandip Tiwari’s father started as a high school teacher. The school’s teachers and their committed compatriot local youth group went on to be major literary and educational figures in public life of the pre- and post-independence India. The Tiwari family, Sandip, Mari, and their children Nachiketa and Kunal are believers in education, skepticism, and comingling of intellectual and manual effort as essentials in nurturing human and rational development.

The Hitkarini Tiwari technology X challenge (HT2X challenge) is established to encourage student groups across departments to organize and assemble interests, expertise, and to pursue integrative technology challenges in a competition. The goal is to bring about an integrative learning approach among the students, to have them think big together and individually, pursue a very challenging complex task reflective of future technology frontiers in the society and experience the bringing together of the many different pieces of learning— grounded in different departments—and organizational, team-working, and independence skills. His views on education can be found in the first chapter of the monograph based on public lectures at IIT and available at
https://www.iitk.ac.in/scdt/Sandip_Tiwari_Kanpur_Lectures.html