By Baqar Naqvi (class of 2018)
(Student, School of Science & Engineering, Habib University)
The IEEE Habib University Student Branch embarked its journey on September 20, 2016. Just after a month later, on October 22nd, 2016, the branch led by its students hosted the biggest annual IEEE XTreme 24-hour programming competition for the IEEE Karachi section. With the great potential possessed by the HU Lions, a couple of months later, the Habib University IEEE student chapter alongside the ACM chapter, which is another student led body at Habib, organized the Code.Play() programming competition.
The competition hosted the participants from various ends, from University to College and even School students were among the participants. The competition was designed rigorously so as to test the intense capabilities of the students indulge in the dilemma of ‘code and play’.
Programming is just not about writing a piece of code, it is more than that, there’s the essential part of logic and then most of all, the toughest part that programmers literally hate, the debugging of the piece of their codes.
Thus, the structure of the competition was composed of three sessions. Plug & Play, the first session was about solving the Jigsaw Puzzles. It might sound a bit of childish but in this modern era it is one of the most important skills, one can possess. Quick puzzle making requires one skill that is of utmost importance: quick-wittedness. How quickly you discern difference between a correct piece and an incorrect piece? Needless to say that it bears a strong resemblance to the 21st century Software Engineering. Even if you ask a layman to guess whether the Software Engineers build everything from scratch or not, he will most likely go for the former option: no one reinvents the wheel. Therefore, in the era of Internet of Things, it is definitely an important task to assess.
Team Gawadar from Habib University won the Plug & Play skill.
Debugging the defects in the piece of codes was the second approach of the event, where a problem set of five questions was given to the participants, each question having a different weightage of points.
The Dominators from Habib University won the debugging module.
Team Sesky from Habib University won the programming module.
The last session had a bit of more intensity. A set of ten problems were uploaded on Hacker Rank for the participants, given a variety of languages, including C/C++, Python and Java, and a time period of two to three hours. But this was not it. The top ten teams from this stage were admitted in the final round to compete among the qualifiers of the first round.
It was a one day event, held on April 8th, 2017, kicking off with the registrations of the participants at 9:00 am, moving on with three different modules of programming sessions, Plug and Play, Debugging and a final frontier programming itself. Eventually ending up with a delightful closing ceremony, where the winners, volunteers and the executives of both the bodies enjoyed the gathering with their winning prizes. Which was a bit of different among the gathered, for some it were certificates, for some it was the winning positions, and most of all altogether it was a huge success that was earned by the organizers.
And not to forget about the effort put by the faculty member Dr. Waqar for the event, who seems to be sleeping in the picture, which shows the intensity of his work, as he often says, “I’m hardly ever unoccupied”.
The event occurred under the executives of the body, IEEE Habib Student Branch, which included, Ashir Wahid (Chairperson), Jahanzeb Ibrar (Vice Chair), Hasnain Raza (Event Manager) and Areeba Aziz (Finance Officer), and ACM Habib Chapter, which included, Anusha Fatima (Chairperson), Hammad Siddiqui (Vice ChairPerson), Usman Ahmed (Secretary) and Anabia Alam (Outreach Officer).
The response was massive, with over 350 participants blended in the tale of Code Play, Habib witnessed, first ever student led event that made a tremendous victory. With the triumph of this story, the students of both the bodies, IEEE Habib chapter and ACM chapter imprinted their names in the history of Habib and polished their capabilities to a higher level.