Organised by Newron – a sub-club within Geekonix that holds quizzes, debates and mock parliaments, this event had 90 registrations, out of which eight teams made it to the finals. The quiz master was Sabyasachi Ganguly, a software development engineer at Agnos.
Geek-O-Pedia had three rounds which had different rules. The first round had direct questions, such as identifying the pictures of the team that developed Microsoft Teams and the Google Doodle featuring Cornelia Sorabji, India’s first female lawyer.
The second round had teams guessing the relation between different pictures. For instance, one team was shown a picture of a matrix in mathematics and a police officer bending backwards to dodge bullets fired at him. The answer was Keanu Reeves in the movie The Matrix.
The third round allowed teams to choose their topic from sports, geo-politics, India, entertainment, business-technology and also a miscellaneous one called the quiz master’s choice.
Subhadeep Sinha Roy and Debottam Mazumder of Team Osikshito from Kalyani Government Engineering College won this event by a wide margin.
Jeet Chakraborty of Techno Main Salt Lake who won Micro Machina
Robo League
This event was organised by the manual robotics wing of Robopalz Robotics Club and required teams of two to four participants to use a bot to drag balls from one end of the arena to specified areas so as to score “goals”. There would be multiple obstacles and an elevated terrain to make it challenging to manoeuvre the bot.
“Since the participants were all at home, we had sent them a blueprint to create the obstacle course at home. We did not specify any material and participants used a range of things from bricks to empty boxes of mobile phones to thermocol blocks to create wedges through which the robots would have to pass without touching the sides of the obstacles,” said Swayam Das, a student of the host college, who was one of the event coordinators.
The wedges had to be just wide enough for the robots to pass through and not any wider to ensure a level playing field. So in course of the event, one of the organisers, Richa Choudhary, frequently asked participants to place a tape to measure the dimensions between the obstacles for the judges to see on screen. A touch invited negative marking.
If the bot fell over or got stuck in an unmanageable corner, the participant was asked to pick the bot and bring it back to the starting position. “We allowed three free startovers. Beyond that, there was negative marking,” Swayam said.
While some bots touched the obstacles more than six times, the majority faced problems in making it up the elevated terrain that was part of the second round.
In the end, two teams from JSPM’s Rajarshi Shahu College of Engineering, Tathawade, Pune emerged as champion and runner-up. Robosapienz Magma, a team from Techno Main, came third.
Micro Machina
This event, organised by the automation wing of Robopalz Robotics Club, required teams to make a fully automated line-following bot which would be capable of moving along a black line on a white surface or white line on a black surface. The bot would also have to traverse through checkpoints and stop at the destination.
The bots could be powered by an external source or battery but it needed to run on DC power supplying less than or equal to 12 volts. The dimensions of the bot also had to be such that it would fit in a box having sides measuring 20 inches.
Most of the bots faced problems while traversing through the loop as those would not follow the path and thus required hand touches to bring them back on track.
A team from Techno Main Salt Lake — Mercurius — however got it right. This team had a single member — Jeet Chakraborty, a third year student of electrical engineering. “I made a bot which took over a a month to reach its current form, fitted with sensors to detect black and white colours. It has won me a prize in all the four offline events I took it to last year. This is the first time I took part in the event in my own institute and though it was online, my bot did not fail me,” Jeet said.
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