Design 101

Design 101 was an interactive session between aspiring designers and Madhur Wadhwa, Head of Design at the Department of Visual Media. Madhur ran the attendees through the basics of designs and instead of talking about the process itself, he focussed on the key elements of designing: fonts, colours and alignment. He differentiated design from art by saying that designing is done with the purpose of solving problems. Madhur went on to cite many examples to illustrate the importance of developing a design sense. The presentation also displayed a lot of his older designs and compared them to his newer ones, highlighting that consistency is integral to growing and that, “The first thousand designs you will make, will be shit.” The session ended with Madhur mentioning some of the common designing tools like Illustrator, Photoshop and Adobe XD and what one can do with each of these.

Bedrock

There were over 200 participants for the first round of Bedrock, which was held just after the E-Week inauguration, on the 4th of February. Each team was given a set of six questions related to what they would do if placed in certain situations; eight teams cleared this round. The auction took place three days later. In this round, the teams bid for the restaurants at C’Not. After all the teams’ bids were accepted, they started making their menus and publicizing their restaurants, making sure to capitalize on the contacts they had. FIFA tournaments and bonfires are examples of some of the stunts which were tried to lure people. On the day of the finals, the teams were informed about multipliers; for example, drenching somebody in water gained the team additional points. Between 5 and 11 PM of that evening, the teams worked tirelessly to create a fun-filled atmosphere where people could spend the evening together with good food.

BITS Royale

The BITS Royale took place on the 9th of February in the FD 2 QT, in five groups. Four teams participated in each slot with each team having a maximum of five people. The teams were given a box containing a sheet with five questions each differing in difficulty. For each question a team got correct, they were given a card, which had an attack, defence, and damage stats corresponding to the difficulty of the question. When a team felt that they had gotten enough cards, they could attack another team, which in turn had to stop answering questions and prepare to defend. Each team started out with 100 health points. Both teams had to place one card down, and whichever card had less defense than the attack of the opposition card would result in a loss of health points for its owner according to the damage of their card. If both cards had less defense than the other card’s attack then both teams would take damage. This went on until one team lost their 100 life points. If the attacking team won, they could answer any questions that their opposition hadn’t. This system of answering and attacking went on until there was only one team left standing.

Negotiataroo

Negotiataroo, which took place in the LTC QT, was meant to test the participants on their ability to negotiate trades of items that might differ significantly in value. Each team was given a list of five items. Their aim was to procure a total of ten items. Each item was worth a different number of points to the various teams and no team had knowledge of the worth of an item to another team. Each of the teams was given a stipend of 200 ‘credits’. The items’ value varied from 20 to 100 credits. The teams were supposed to make deals with each other. These deals were provisional; they could be cancelled before the time elapsed. What proceeded was a series of some very bizarre-seeming deals, which included the trade of a tetra pack for the painting of Mona Lisa (not the real one).

Startup Conclave

The Startup Conclave took place in the NAB Audi, with line-up of six BITSian startups: Assist, Pepper, Hello Vorld, Gnomikx, Escape Suicide, and Testagon. Representatives from each startup were given came up on stage and spoke to the attendees about how they went about creating their startup. Rahul Chhabra started off the conclave, teaching the audience how to go about starting their own venture. He talked about his own mistakes and motivated the audience to learn from them. Testagon spoke about the hiring of interns, and how companies are ways for different people to get together and learn from each other. Akshit Bordia of Escape Suicide told the audience about the product they were working on; an A.I. device that tracked one’s mental status, and could identify illnesses like depression at a very early stage.

Auctionville

Held in LTC 5102, Auctionville took place in two rounds. Each team was first given a list of cricketers. Certain restrictions were set, and were asked to make a team that would gain them the maximum possible points (each player was worth a certain number of points). The top eight teams went on to the second round. A list of cricketers across various categories- bowler, batsman, wicketkeeper, all-rounder, uncapped, capped, and a mystery category; a total of 77 players-  were up for auction. This auction was inspired by the IPL auctions for cricketers, and was held in that fashion. The team which could create the most efficient cricket team won.