The first Women Hackathon for the new academic year was conducted at College Of Engineering , Munnar on 19,20 and 21 of August,2016. The partcipants were around 16, second and final year girl students, from the college spanning different departments like Computer Science , Electronics and Communication and Electrical Engineering.
The workshop started on 19 th with an introductory session on free software. The idea of freedom in software as a form of knowledge was discussed in an interactive manner. The students were familiarized with the various freedoms users get to enjoy with a free software and the concept of copyleft.An initial skeptical audience soon found it comfortable with the software freedom as a way of sharing and multiplying the knowledge. After a break for lunch, a game was conducted to challenge students in building opinion on an idea independently, expressing the opinion and changing them if needed. A session on GNU/Linux followed, with a step-by- step procedure to install a Linux based operating system (Debian).
Day 2 started with Debian installation on the student machines. This was a learning experience for the students and the resource persons . A refreshing game was conducted emphasizing on the learnings of the previous sessions. This was followed by a hands-on session on GNU/Linux file system , basic commands and package installation.
Day 3 began with a brief familiarisation of Python succeeded by a session on Python- OpenCV. Python-OpenCV was introduced by a program to track an object using image capture on the system camera. Various features of the library like contours was discussed and self -learning methods were suggested. On the whole, it was an intense yet interesting learning experience for the students as well as resource persons. The resource persons for the workshop were Arun, Jithin, Sachin, Aiswarya and co-ordinated by Soumya.
