Yarl Geek Challenge - Season 3 - Selections

Already a lot of independent posts have been made about YGC3 selections. This post is biased and from my own pair of dark shaded glasses. Pictures used in this blog are by Hareesan.

Format of YGC

We have been toying with the format of YGC from season 1. Evolving from a reality styled show to what we have currently. Which is a hybrid of a hackathon and a business plan competition. I think that we are heading in the right direction. Doesn't mean its perfect still. As YIT I think we need to keep on experimenting till we get it right. Hence we made it a point to go out of our way to ask from all the participants to throw all their criticism at us. One, it keeps us grounded. Two, it gives us an opportunity to look for brighter ideas to achieve the vision sooner.

YGC Junior

The kids were impressive and left the first timers to YGC awestruck. Gnanakeethan looked very promising and technically sound. He has a great journey in front of him if he manages to keep himself focused and stays grounded. Aptly the award for the overall winner prize was given away by Dr. Maheson a legendary personality in terms of IT in Jaffna.

Team from Jaffna Hindu College was adjudged as the Winner of Yarl Geek Challenge Junior Season 3.

Again I am impressed with the Girls from Vembadi. Their presentation and speaking skills are exceptional. I hope that they do take to IT. Watching them I was thinking that a grassroot level initiative is needed to make more girls take to IT and start creating things. They should break out of the stereotypes on the job categories designated for women. Probably ladies already in IT should help to take this message and inspire the kids to take to IT. Any volunteers? YIT will back you!

Teams from Vembadi Girls High school won the two category prizes for the best mobile and best web applications. The winners of the mobile application category created a mobile application to help in the fight against Ebola. I was wondering and then finally walked up to them and asked on how they came up with that concept.

VGHS team who won the best mobile category getting the prize from Sarves

VGHS Team which won the best web application category getting the prize from Dr. Roshan.

This time we also had a hardware category. A team from Karainagar with minimum resources managed to win this. Thanks to Niroshan they had a working prototype of a letter detector for letter box made out of Arduino.

Best hardware Category was won by the team from Dr. Thiyagaraja M.M.V, Karainagar.
Prize was given by Eric - Chairman of LAN

YGC 3
I do not wish to comment about individual teams at this point of time. Since the opportunity round is happening this weekend and the finale will be held on the 22nd November. In short, the teams look promising. I hope and pray a few start ups will get funded and take their products to market.

Out of the 6 teams which have qualified for the finale  as of now . Two teams are from the 6 month old Engineering faculty from Kilinochchi. They come with minimal resources when compared with all the other Universities who competed from all over the Island, but had a lot of passion and commitment to make a statement.  Thananjeyan and Arunan. That's the biggest coup you guys could have pulled off. I am impressed. Now that you guys have set standards expecting to achieve greater heights.

Will be back with more after the finale.