City Kemp News
The balmy morning of Saturday 25th July saw computer science whiz-kids from the NPS group of schools converge at the National Public School Koramangala campus to attend India’s first day long Inter-school Hackathon, aptly named NPSK- HACK 2015 with the tag line ‘Build. Learn. Win’.
Designed to be an event for the coolest, meanest and leanest of computer buffs, it was a chance for high-school programmers to show off their skills in the field of computing and come together under a single roof to build simply amazing things – games, web services, algorithms or applications that have social impact. And all they came armed with was an intense passion for coding and designing along with a killer idea and a laptop!
As the contestants settled down and set up their workstations, the keynote address was delivered by Sandeep Alur, Lead Evangelist at Microsoft India. He was pleasantly surprised by the arrangements in place for the Hackathon which he declared was at par with the best in the industry. While he urged students to network and share ideas- the best way to come up with solutions to critical social problems- he also advised them to ‘fail fast’- which is to let go of an idea that takes one nowhere and quickly move on to a fresh one.
‘Keep Calm and Innovate’, the buzzword of the event struck a chord with the participants who were occupied throughout the day, developing ideas ranging from Smart Ambulance Navigation to augmented reality applications, all with real world applications. They were guided by an amazing line up of mentors from the technology industry including Jaisimha Prasad, Senior Group Manager at Target, Udaya Reddy, CTO at Accenture and UtkarshBiradar CEO & Co- Founder of Momoe who helped them iron out irritants as they built marvellous pieces of code. The panel of industry veterans judged the teams based on the innovative nature of their ideas, the design elements of the applications and how much work they had completed within the stipulated period.
The students from the National Academy of Excellence walked away with the Rolling Trophy for coming up with the idea of helping ambulances easily navigate through heavy traffic. All teams resolved to continue working on their ideas until the end products were developed. The NPS Hackathon is undoubtedly an event that has come to stay and will feature annually in the calendar of high school students in Bangalore!
