Jamshedpur Girl Shines At International Stage, Makes India Proud

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Jamshedpur Girl Shines At International Stage, Makes India Proud

Collaboration can give birth to game-changing ideas. And hackathons provide the perfect breeding grounds for both collaborations and innovations. Bringing together students, educators, teachers, and the research community of India and Africa, the UNESCO INDIA – AFRICA Hackathon was organized in November this year.

The hackathon was a 36 hours event that provided a suitable platform for young innovators to find solutions for social, environmental, and technical problems faced by the collaborating nations. We got in touch with Shreya Narayan, one of the members of the winning team- Code Lunatics. The team won under the ‘Education’ sub-theme. Shreya, who is currently pursuing her BTech in Information Technology from Bangalore Institute of Technology, shared her inspiring story with us.

Lockdown - a blessing in disguise for me!

My story starts in the pandemic period of 2020. The world was at a standstill and uncertainty and apprehension loomed large everywhere. Hence, to divert my mind away from all the negativity, I decided to make the most of my free time. So, I bought an online full-stack development course to upskill myself. And it was an epiphany. I discovered that my core interest lies in full-stack development. Building upon what I learned, I developed many projects on full stack and eventually even developed the placement website for my college! And now there was no looking back.

Experience at UNESCO-India-Africa Hackathon 2022

In 2022, I won the Smart India Hackathon organized by the Ministry of Human Resource Development. This made me qualify for UNESCO-India-Africa Hackathon 2022. It was a great opportunity that gave me chance to collaborate with teammates from Mali, Malawi, and Mauritius. Our team- Code Lunatics, dealt with a problem under the theme ‘Data Collection, Analysis and Visualization App to Transform Schools.’ We thus created a data collection, analysis, and visualization application based on educational data from the school and district levels.

Using the web frontend, we provided forms for data collection, analyzed the data collected, and then had the reports sent from one level to other. For early prediction of student performance, we made use of ML models. We were able to complete all our assigned tasks till the last round. The experience was enriching but winning the hackathon was altogether a different feeling.

I had many takeaways from UNESCO-India-Africa Hackathon 2022, but the only advice I would like to give to other brilliant minds is to never get demotivated. If you have given your 100%, you will surely get positive results. Patience is the key.