Oculus 2021: Technical Events

Codatron/Codatron++

Codatron presented by the Oculus Coding League was a traditional coding contest for the First years to pave a way for them to get a headstart in the world of competitive programming. A virtual bootcamp for the FEs was organized on 27-28th of February preceded Codatron, wherein they could build a strong foundation in competitive programming under the mentorship of their experienced seniors. Codatron, held virtually on 13-14th of March, was where the participants could apply what they had learned in the OCL Bootcamp. This helped them truly test their knowledge. The winners of Codatron were Shrenik Jadhav followed by Jai Patel, 1st Runner-up and Sidhhant Dutta, 2nd Runner-up. The event was a huge success as it was both educational and a fun event.

As against Codatron, a new event called Codatron++ was also organised on Hackerrank which had only one round instead of two. With seemingly deadly and mind-boggling coding puzzles it was ensured that only the best coder would win! The competition, the grit and the sheer passion with which the participants played was a joy to the spectator. After an intense battle, the master brains who walked away with the gold were Gokul Raj, Arjan Bal and Pritish Nayak. A special category called ‘Top 3 SPIT Coders’ was also announced with Sahil Marwaha, Adwait Hegde and Ayush Sah as the sequenced prize winners.

“Our aim was to develop a coding culture among the First Years who were completely new to the world of competitive programming and with the help of the exhaustive BootCamp and Codatron, a two stage event with a variety of questions, both witnessing a participation of 120+ participants, we were able to achieve this to a pretty good extent”
Deep Nayak, Organising team of OCL

Oculus Coding League: Code Wars

OCL (Oculus Coding League) introduced some exciting events in its début year to awaken the tech genius in students! With this unique edition of online Oculus, OCL brought to us the Code Wars, a thrilling and exciting battle among the best coders. A race against time to solve real-world problems. Held on the 13th of March 2021, this team game consisted of three rounds: The Battle Royale, PlayOffs and the FaceOff. Organisers made the playing teams face each other in groups: the traditional round of 32, round of 16, the quarters, semis and finals. The last team standing after all the qualification rounds would emerge as the winner!

Teams, not just from S.P.I.T. but all over India, clashed head on to solve codes within the time limit. The alluring cash prizes, like 6k and 3k for 1st and 2nd place holder in the finale and 1.5k each for the semi finalists, made the participants fight with more vigour and passion

After some really gruelling rounds, the emerging winning teams of this exhaustive coding competition were: Pritish Nayak, Niket Agarwal and Satyabrat Panda (first position), Arjan Bal, Gokul Raj and Srinivas Rao (second position) Rajat Parab and Rayyan Merchant & JaydeepMore, Keshav Mishra and Vedanth Kokate (third position)

Start-a-thon 2.0

Start-a-thon 2.0 was a national level startup ideation challenge wherein teams across the country competed against each other in a 2 day event, which took place on 20^th and 21^st March 2021. The competition was conducted in three major rounds. With over 140 participants, the first screening round required each team to submit a 2-page business proposal. These proposals were reviewed by the panel and the top 15 teams were selected for the second round where they had to work on the problem statement related to the domain they chose out of the given 5. Mentoring sessions took place throughout the event where the mentors shared their wisdom and insight with the teams.

The final round was the ‘pitching round’ which took place on the second day where all the participants put forth their presentations in front of a panel of investors with the aim of being funded. The competition was judged by Sumit Jasoria- MD Meero India, Nitin Dadoo-Investor of IP Ventures and Harshita Singh- Venture Garage. After the three nerve-wracking rounds, the results were finally announced. The competition was so cut throat that there was a tie for first place and both the teams were rewarded 7500 bucks each, a 3 month incubation at SP-TBI and a digital certificate.

“After the success of Start-a-Thon 1.0, we hoped to have good participation in this year’s event Start-a-Thon 2.0. The quality of applications was a step up in comparison to the previous edition. The enthusiasm of the participants combined with the expertise of the mentors helped us achieve our goal of providing a platform to innovative ideas and help further their efforts.”
Team SP-TBI

Virtual Stock Market

Oculus’ Mega-event The Virtual Stock market returned with a bang and certainly lived up to its theme “Risq hai toh Ishq hai”. The post Scam 1992 era had tweaked everyone’s interests in trading stocks and VSM provided the perfect platform to students for just that. To get the participants in the groove two pre-events were organised on the VSM’s Instagram handle namely ‘The Bull’s eye’ and ‘Shakespeare Lite’ whose winners were awarded exciting prizes and Utopia’s currency as a head start. ‘Utopia’ was the fictional city where participants invested in various stocks with the help of its official currency ‘Aziones’.

The main event was held on 13th and 14th of march on the Official VSM app. The storyline was intriguing and kept the investors hitched to their seats as they watched markets rise and fall in a spectacular fashion. The winners of the first day were Hrishikesh Lokhande, Kamal Raisinghani and Priya Agarwal at first, second and third place and the second day winners were Pulin Prabhu, Khush Jain and Kunal Mandvakar in sequence. There were massive cash prizes overall totaling 45k INR which helped increase the buzz and intrigue, keeping everyone trying their best to get their hands on the win.

“With the VSM being online, I was skeptical about how the VSM team would conduct the whole event as it is so dependent on the Android app. But according to me, this was the best managed VSM with an easy to use application and great storylines on both days. The host made it easy for everyone to understand the various headlines in each round and the help desk available on AirMeet was ever so helpful in assisting with any troubles that we had.Overall, this whole experience was flawless and played a huge role in making Oculus such a grand success”
Hrishikesh Lokhande, a three time winner of VSM