New Delhi, Apr 27 (IANS): A virtual classroom created by students from Government College of Engineering in Kannur, Kerala, to make learning easier and intuitive in COVID-19 times has won $10,000 (approx Rs 7.6 lakh) as winner of the 72-hour online hackathon called CODE19.
The hackathon was organised by California-based Motwani Jadeja Foundation this month to find solutions to India's challenges against the new coronavirus pandemic and the foundation awarded $34,000 in total to various teams from across the country.
iClassroom has been created by 19-year-old Abhinand C and 20-year-old Shilpa Rajeev.
"With iClassroom, students and teachers can interact with each other, clear their doubts, mentor others and conduct online classes," said Abhinand.
Shilpa added: "We built this platform as a practical solution for all learning communities to interact with each other, share resources and keep track of progress in selected courses. We now intend to enhance iClassroom's functionality by integrating several useful apps".
Code19 was held in collaboration with Bengaluru-based HackerEarth. The Association of Designers in India (ADI) helped in providing mentors through its network.
"I believe that the qualitative, open-source projects created at this hackathon would help mitigate the impending Corona-inflicted challenges in India," said Founder-philanthropist Asha Jadeja Motwani.
The second price worth $5,000 went to TeleVital, a solution for contactless health assessment of a patient created by a 6-student team from Manipal Institute of Technology.
The solution records a patient's heart rate, respiratory rate, body temperature, etc. without any contact-based measurement tool.
Three teams won $3,000 each at third place. The projects were SoloCoin from a team from various colleges across India, led by project lead Arbob Mehmood of UPES University, Dehradun; Covid19 Fact Checker created by a team from AISSMS College of Engineering, Pune; and Grape Community, created by Ranjoy Sen, a 35-year-old software professional from Bengaluru.
In addition, 10 best innovative solutions were awarded $1,000 each.