The Forum for Aspiring Computer Engineers successfully organized their flagship event, Stay Late and Code (SLAC) for the third year in a row on 28th of February, 2015. The 24 hour hackathon provided a platform for budding engineers to showcase their skills. Besides the three engineering campuses under Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, this year FACE expanded its outreach to the top fifteen colleges of Bangalore as well. There were seventy five teams registered with two hundred and thirty odd participants.
The formal inauguration of the event began at 9.am on Saturday morning at Amriteshwari Hall in the presence of our esteemed judges and chief guests Mr. K Shashidhar, Lead Architect for Quantum Secure and Former Head, CIR Department, ASE-Bangalore, Mr. Sathish Ramakrishnan, Chief Architect for Quantum Secure and Mr. Bharat Karur, Senior Program Manager ,Oracle Consulting.
With the timer ticking down to zero seconds and the crowd counting down in unison, FACE officially started their much awaited event, SLAC for the year 2015 at 10:30a.m. Dim blue lights, good music and free internet access to allow the participants to refer to resources at their convenience, coding platforms were seen to be the background on every screen. With the grub stall outside the computer lab and a photo-booth loaded with various accessories, the participants frequented the same during their breaks. FACE also conducted a mini challenges on portal.slacfest.comand gave the top two teams flipchart vouchers as prizes. SLAC stickers and stamp print on the hands of all allowed easy access and identification of those involved in the contest. The coordinators along with the help of the volunteers managed to organize and pull off the event efficiently.
The presentation began at 10:30a.m. the next day and went on till 3:30p.m in the afternoon. The presentation session witnessed many innovative and remarkable applications and the judges had a tough time deciding on the edge-cutting app of the lot.
Rakshak from Atria Institute of Technology won first place and was awarded a cash prize of Rs.12000 for his impressive Khan Academy android app. Second place was secured by team Spieler, NirpekshTomar, Jaymodh and Paras Sharma of ASE-Bangalore. Their game on lasers and mirrors won them a cash prize of Rs.10000. Team Space Monkey Mafia, consisting Adithya C., Ganesh B. R. , Kunal Pal Varma and Ghadhathara Raja won Rs.9000 at third place for their gesture oriented texting app for the blind. The first year team, helloWorld comprising of Akhilesh Anand, Venkatramanan Srinivasan and Mangalnathan received the special mention award of Rs.5000 for their app based on the Enigma Machine.
SLAC-2015 proved to be a platform not only to learn and develop applications but also a juncture where many like minded people met and exchanged thoughts and ideas. The sleepless night where two hundred odd students sat in their niches coding and all the fun through the twenty four hours are wonderful memories all of them will look back to years down the line. Until then, looking forward to the next hackathon with much anticipation, SLAC-2016!
