Recreation for technical minds

COLLEGE FEST

In an engineering college one expects the fest to be technical but blending innovation with technicality is something that is peculiar to Esya 2013. The third edition of Indira Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Delhi’s annual fest included not just the crowd from engineering colleges in the City but also school students pursuing their studies in programming and software.

With 8000 youngsters participating in the two-day fest, it was one of the most successful years for Esya. “The name has been derived from the Sanskrit term for exploration. Therefore the tagline is ‘Exploring Infinity’,” informs Amol Verma, convenor, Esya 2013.

Standing true to the term the fest explored opportunities in events such as Techathon, RoboCon, Overnight Hackathon, The Big Ban, Rebuttle and X Quiz IT to name a few.

Techathon – the online programming contest started a week before the main event and took place at the Okhla Campus. It received more than 1000 entries in teams of two.

Many school students also got themselves enrolled for they stood a chance to win points to earn admission in IIIT, Delhi after completing school. A similar response was seen for The Big Bang and Rebuttle where school students competed at the same level as college students and gave latter a tough competition.

The Overnight Hackathon debuted at Esya this year with participants creating mobile applications overnight. “It was amazing to see the participants brainstorm over codes for Windows phone for three tracks – imaging, music and location. The three winning teams comprising three members each have won themselves a Nokia Lumia 620 smartphone,” says Romil Bhardwaj, head organiser. 

While treasure hunt in other college fests is restricted to the campus, here the competition Hunt IT got extended to neighbourhood localities. With the basic aim to promote collaboration, the Hunt IT proved to be a success even though the students came back baffled since some of them lost their way!

To add substance to the regular competition list, few events were tweaked in a fashion so as to be useful to society at large. One such example was Prayatna which required the participants to solve social problems using technology. “The top six teams were paired with NGOs working in respective fields to check practicality of the new invention,” shares Amol. 

There was also a blood donation drive organised under the aegis of Esya volunteers but nothing could beat the popularity of RoboCon and Gaming. While the first edition of RoboCon at Esya saw participation of engineering students from as far as Tamil Nadu, the virtual gaming arena was more abuzz with students than the rest of the campus in total.

For RoboCon, prizes worth Rs 38,000 were awarded to the winners and the gaming enthusiasts won headsets and T-shirts.

With a rain dance party in evening, this student endeavour came to an end over glasses of cold coffee and some Bollywood music from the console!