The Annual IT Symposium ‘Exun 2020’ was hosted by Exun Clan, the Technology Club of Delhi Public School, RK Puram was held for the 25th time in ‘Exun Week’, from 15th to 22nd November, 2020. The event was sponsored by Athena Education and BML Munjal University and supported by Wolfram, Devfolio and Women Who Code, Delhi. This event was the 3rd National IT Symposium for and by the tech enthusiast students under the supervision of the Computer Science Department of the school, with select competitions enjoying international participation.
A prominent feature of Exun Week this year were the various Exun Talks, given by experienced alumni and professionals such as Andre Cardoso, the creator of a popular GameDev YouTube channel – Mix and Jam. Additionally, a Fireside chat was organised with some of our most-experienced alumni discussing their careers and the contemporary tech landscape. The introduction for the closing ceremony was given by Rahul Merwah, the founder of Exun Clan, back in 1991.
This year, with 800+ registrations from 50 schools, Exun along with The Gaming Club-DomainSquare+, Robotics Club – RoboKnights and Cubing Club – CubXL organised 22 different IT events including an Online Cryptic Hunt– SudoCrypt and a Girls in Tech event.
Exun Week was preceded by SudoCrypt 10.0, the tenth iteration of Exun Clan’s flagship online cryptic hunt, held from 9-10th November. The format of the hunt was redesigned, shifting from a traditional cryptic hunt to a text adventure based hunt. More than 1000 participants took part in SudoCrypt, accumulating a total of 200,000+ points. Preliminary rounds for Competitive Programming, Group Discussion and the SpaceTech event took place before Exun Week commenced as well.
On the occasion of the 25th Exun, Exun Clan also released the 15th issue of its Annual Magazine – “UnderScore”, available at exun.co/underscore.
EXUN WEEK: Schedule
On the first day, Sunday the 15th, the symposium was inaugurated in the opening ceremony, where the Introductory Video (exun.co/video) for Exun 2020 was presented by Exun Clan, showcasing brief particulars about the events and the achievements of the club. On the same day, the Hardware and Machine Learning tasks were released.
The Principal, in her welcome address, expressed her admiration for the club and the rapid advances they have made in the IT field. Furthermore, she articulated on the significance of technology and how she herself cannot do without it. At the same time, she emphasised the human aspect of life, and described how technology is a very powerful weapon, and should not be misused. Towards the end of her speech, she congratulated the entire Computer Science Department, calling them the backbone of the school, and praised Exun for being one of the most seasoned clubs.
On Monday, tasks for the RoboKnights BISCUITS event were released, the Quiz and Crossword prelims took place, and a tutorial workshop was organised by Women Who Code, Delhi for the Girls in Tech event which continued into the next day.
On Tuesday, the tasks for the Build events, Hackathon, Designathon, and Unreality were released. The Surprise and DomainSquare+ Gaming prelims also took place, along with semis of the Lockout programming event.
Wednesday started with the Turing Test (Computational Linguistics) competition, followed by the Surprise event finals which continued onto the next day.
Thursday had the Group Discussion semifinals, along with the Girls in Tech prelims and DomainSquare+ Gaming finals. On Friday, the Group Discussion and Make-a-Thon event concluded with their finals.
Saturday began with a bang, with all 3 Build events, Hackathon, Designathon and Unreality having demos. Next, the SpaceTech semifinals and finals pitches took place, along with Lockout finals and Cubing finals which continued the next day.
On Sunday, the day started with “Exun Fireside Chat” (exun.co/fireside) with 3 Exun alumni prominently involved with the tech landscape – Mr. Gaurav Lochan (President, 1994-95), Mr. Saif Hasan (President, 1994-95) and Mr. Manas Mittal (President, 2000-01). Afterwards, the Crossword finals took place, followed by the Quizzing finals.Finally to conclude the symposium, the closing ceremony was held, which started with addresses by the Exun founder, Mr. Rahul Merwah, Mr. Ankit Wadhwa (President, 1999-2000), Gursartajj Singh Nijjar (President, 2006-07), Ananay Arora (President, 2016-17) and Teacher In-Charge Mr. Mukesh Kumar sir, followed by announcement of winners and expression of gratitude towards participants for attending the event.
EVENTS
Group Discussion was conducted in 3 rounds. A preliminary round had participants use harmless modern internet slang such as “gg”, “tbh”, “ngl” and others while expressing their argument. This was followed by semi-finals and finals, with the latter having a question answer round. Mr. Sameer Chadha, Mr. Shiv Sethi and Mr. Siddhant Shah, alumni of DPS RK Puram and Exun Clan, were the judges for the event.
Build was an event wherein students were competing against each other in all aspects of design, game and software development. The Designathon event had participants working on rebranding their favourite album, and was judged by Mr. Gyan Lakhwani, Mr. Yatharth and Mr. Devansh Gandhi. The Hackathon event was judged by Mr. Sibesh Kar and Mr. Achal Varma. The Unreality (Game Development) event had the dual themes, “Regeneration” and “Entropy”, and was judged by Mr. Ayush Singla, Mr. Anirudh Chauhan and Mr. Bhavya Khandelwal. All were alumni of DPS RK Puram and Exun Clan.
Crossword was conducted in two rounds, a preliminary and a final round. The event included pun-based, tech-related questions. The event was conducted by Mr. Udit Malik, an alumni of DPS RK Puram and Exun Clan.
ExML, the Machine Learning event involved a rich variety of unique yet equally mesmerising machine learning paradigms on display and in use. In the ExML contest, there were a plethora of tasks to choose from, covering the various Machine Learning paradigms. The tasks had a subjective focus, with an emphasis on the quality of data science, perceptible results and data ethics, and each participant had to include a writeup describing their solution and how they came about it, along with their submissions. The event was judged by Mr. Ayush Singla and Mr. Sagnik Anupam, both alumni of DPS RK Puram and Exun Clan.
The basis of the SpaceTech event was the growing importance and applicability of space science in engineering that directly benefits us on Earth, by giving us clearer perspectives and direct returns in the form of technical advancements. The event, judged by Mr. Udit Malik, Mr. Shiv Sethi and Mr. Bhavya Khandelwal, was held in collaboration with the New Delhi Space Society. Participants had to devise innovative methods to traverse the surface of the Moon and provide routes between specified locations. The event culminated with participants pitching their innovations in a semifinal round, followed by an unconventional final where the 3 finalists were given preparation time of an hour to find flaws in the systems of other teams, while also finding aspects which they would like to incorporate in their own system.
Competitive Programming saw the participants face a plethora of problems based on logic, algorithms and data structures. They were evaluated on the basis of the time they took to solve the problems. The online qualifying round saw more than 1000 participants, including 192 international participants, out of which 10 teams battled it out in the onsite finals.
The Gaming event, organized by DomainSquare+ focussed on the abilities of gamers to adapt to different situations as they were presented with games like Nidhogg, Shovel Knight, Curveball, Super Hexagon, Devil Daggers and Assault Cube. Make-a-Thon, an event based on designing innovative systems with the application of robotics and engineering, and BISCUITS, Build and Design Circuits, events were hosted by RoboKnights. The BISCUITS was judged by Danish Bansal and Pranshu Malik, former Presidents of Roboknights, whereas the Make-a-Thon was judged by Aniansh Raj ,and Shaurya Jain, former Presidents of RoboKnights, along with Vinamr Sachdeva.
Turing Test assessed the skills of participants by testing them on problems based on various computational linguistics paradigms.
In the Open Quiz, the preliminary round was a form, with an online finals where they were required to answer a number of questions on a diverse range of topics such as Technology, I.T, tech-politics, and Gaming. The “Infinite Pounce and Bounce” system was in play throughout the quiz, which was conducted by Mr. Bharat Kashyap, an Exun and DPSRKP alumnus, and Mr. Pranava Dhar, an alumnus of DPS Noida.
Cubing Event, the first day started with war of speed with three solves by each and the average of the three was taken for shortlisting them for final. A total of 24, 9 from 2×2, 9 from 3×3 and 6 from Pyraminx were selected for finals.
In collaboration with the not-for-profit organization ‘Women Who Code, Delhi’, Exun 2020 featured a workshop and a unique ‘Girls in Tech’ event, with an aim to increase female representation in tech fields and provide girls with a platform to showcase their talent. The theme for this year was generative art, where P5.js was used. The event consisted of two initial interactive workshops to familiarize the participants with the required pre-requisites after which, the preliminary round had participants replicate provided graphics whereas the finals required them to make interactive simulations and animations relating to STEM-concept based prompts.
The Surprise Event consisted of two rounds. The first was a relay of many games ranging from Chess to QuizUp. The final round asked participants to recognize companies based on portfolios and invest in them in hopes to make it big in the stock market. The event was judged by Mr. Aman Verma, Mr. Aaryak Garg and Mr. Aravind Ashok, alumni of DPS RK Puram and Exun Clan.
The DomainSquare+ PC Gaming event focused on the abilities of gamers to adapt to different situations with competitive games like Fistful of Frags in the preliminary rounds, Vector for the semi-finals and Blade Symphony for the Finale. The event had judges Mr. Saharsh Vedi, former President of DS+, Mr. Saumya Gaikwad, Mr. Aravind Ashok and Mr. Aaryak Garg.
To increase the level of excitement and thrill of participating in an “online hardware” event, our Hardware event aimed for a new angle of approach through a unique team-based task format. Students had to compete against other schools in a Hardware hunt, which had an online platform of operation and had hints stored in an encrypted file. Participants also had to participate in 4 other tasks, including benchmarking and OS review. The event judges were Mr. Aditya Singh and Mr. Danish Bansal, alumnus of Exun Clan and DPSRKP.
The Computer Science Teachers comprising of Mr. Mukesh Kumar, Ms. Hema Jain, Ms. Sangeeta Rana, Mr. Mohitendra Dey, Ms. Shalini Harisukh, Ms. Sarika Kaushal, Ms. Anjana Virmani, Ms. Nandini Dasgupta, Mr. Shekhar Sharma and Mr. Ajitkumar K.G. as a team efficiently organised this grand event along with the support of Tech. Team composed of Mr. Thomas C.A., Mr. Diny Mathew, Mr. K.V.Joseph, Mr. Shankar Giri assisted by Mr. Ram Kumar and Mr. Ramjas.
The student team was led by Shashwat Chandra, Natasha Arya, Amadika Mahapatra, Rian Borah, Kushagra Gupta, Akshit Kumar, Priyanshi Ahuja, Alankar Dutta, and Alhad Sethi. Extraordinary efforts from members and adhocs made the event possible and were greatly appreciated.
The Overall Trophies were given to the following schools:
• First: DELHI PUBLIC SCHOOL, VASANT KUNJ
• Second: DELHI PUBLIC SCHOOL, DWARKA
• Third: AMITY INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL, SEC-46, GURGAON
The SudoCrypt results are as follows:
Rank Name Institution
SudoKing Agamdeep Singh Ramjas School, R.K. Puram
SudoKnight#2 Dhruva Goyal The Mother’s International School
SudoKnight#3 Hitarth Khurana, Delhi Public School, Dwarka
SudoKnight#4 Deepak Singh, Independent
SudoKnight#5 Shobhit Rathi, Independent
SudoKnight#6 Abhi K, Independent
The individual results of the events were updated on https://lnexun.com/ as soon as events concluded.