A three-day Make-a-thon was conducted at the School of Electrical Engineering, VIT University recently.
According to a press release, there were 306 registered participants that were shortlisted by the organisers to 180 registrants. Out of them, students of VIT University – from first to third year engineering courses — were divided into 43 teams under six different categories.
P. Arulmozhivarman, professor and dean, School of Electrical Engineering, VIT, said that the purpose of the Make-a-thon was to motivate students, industry as well as academia to interact and innovate with each other. The problem of the industry was undertaken by the students as a challenge and they created a prototype of the solution as well as a business plan.
The teams were judged for their solutions in the fields of energy and environmental monitoring, robotics and industrial automation, smart agriculture, smart energy harvesting, IoT and sensors for smart city, data security and networks and public awareness, the release said.
Forty of the 43 teams qualified at the end of 36 hours of Make-a-thon. Industry experts and professors reviewed the projects and selected the 10 best projects as the finalists.
While students who excelled in this competition are offered internships by the industries, VIT University also gave away awards of ₹10,000 to first prize winners, ₹7,500 to second and 5,000 for the third prize winners.
A team of students, who developed and demonstrated a novel method to gamify ECG output, bagged the first prize, while another team, which came up with a smart crop management system where different requirements of a crop like water, fertilisers are sensed by sensors and provided as needed won the second place, the release.
