 We just had a overview of what students have done in the past and what they are able to achieve from this kind of hackathon being organized in their institutes. So this was example from ESEL and now let us just get into a short sequence of proceedings what has to be done for preparing in order to prepare for a hackathon what should be your process. So I am just going to share couple of slides with you I am just going to talk about certain aspects which you should remember when you are preparing for a hackathon. Now I understand all the people who are attending most of them are curious to know what is hackathon and there are some people who want to genuinely participate and experience it. So both these types of people will be definitely wanting to know how to prepare for one such hackathon. These are kind of very informally collaborated slides so you can you may see some very interesting anecdotes in between and all that. So do not expect a technical presentation as such what we are going to have now. So this is the overview of what is the preparation required. So the first and foremost thing if you notice from whatever has been said so far and if you just google for this word also the basic aspect is that it is a team event. So remember that it is not a single person or maybe a pair also sometimes may not work. It is a team event and you require people from all walks of life to come together like students your friends and then collaborate in order to get this thing going. Now when you want to start that obviously because it is a time bound affair therefore you need to plan it very very well and that is the whole crux of the whole participating in hackathon is most of the time planning perfectly for this particular the way you are going to approach it. Now let me just go back to the slides okay so we were talking about the preparation phase here and like I said because it is a team event the building and the complexion of the team becomes one of the most important part in the preparatory phase. The second important part is about how to design a strategy which will help you to solve the problem at the end and finally but not actually less in any terms is the practice part because you have to perform within a stipulated time frame therefore there is no choice but to practice it enough that when you go there you can just deliver in that time frame. The team is a very crucial part and you can see that it is not necessary that every time the team what you are planning to have together has to be only in a particular format of your liking. I mean to say that whenever you pick up a team please remember the objective of the hackathon. For example if a hackathon is about a hardware problem then you might require people who have the hardware background. On the other side if it is a out and out software coding hackathon where java is the native language which is to be used then you may not do this mistake of taking lots of hardware people with you because they would not be of any use when the problem comes in java. Mirror analogy which I could think of is in cricket where you have told that the pitch is supporting the batsman but then you have selected lots of bowlers in your team. So the team selection is very very important and crucial therefore remember the objective of the hackathon and then take the team with you. This can be even spread out to people like who are non-programmers maybe good designers good crafts people at times you require people who can do things for you who have hands-on skills with them. There could be good pessimist in the team who will constantly argue with you about why you are taking such a decision and it will help you think more detailed manner in order to incorporate a particular change in the whole strategy. So the combination has to be always kept in mind when you have the objective clearly defined of the hackathon so think about that objective and then select the team. Now here we have often seen and if you just go and have a look at hackathon experiences the teams which are competing with each other also may offer some help at times if you are stuck and they can see that you are stuck there they may offer the help but remember they are competitors so they may not help you to solve the entire problem so do not depend on such things rather have your own stuff with you. So the point is that you will not be able to choose a team clearly unless and until you study the objective well. From the team you have to plan how you will going to work during the hackathon so that patch is time bound therefore you have to estimate both the loads whatever you have to work out during that time and also because human body will require some rest you have to also think of what is the level of comfort you can effort to have during that time. Why I am saying effort to because at time there are people who have not slept throughout the hackathons and then they keep on working all the time but not possible for everybody because it can be 48 hours and sometimes more than that so you have to plan for both plan for your work and also for your comfort time now how to do that we will come to that later but the third part is about the strategy now there could be situations which will be coming up during the hackathon which will require change in your strategy the ideal condition is you imagine various situations which could be possibly happening during the particular phase of the hackathon and prepare multiple strategies so that if one fails you have the other option to go ahead and crack it or you have the options at least to discuss with somebody so the team and the strategies will work hand in hand at this point and the complexion of the team again like I said will come handy because you will have options to play on and again I come back to the cricket analogy because if the run rate is high you send the biggest hitter of the ball because you want to score more runs at that time so it is it is as simple as that at time but maybe the non-cricketing people may not agree with me on this but they can think of any other options because it applies to any mode of game actually speaking discuss these strategies beforehand because you can take the team into confidence plan out and think about whether you can go in other direction at that time by the feedback which they will give you that will help you in drilling more holes kind of problems which your strategy may have and that would be better if collective intelligence is put together rather than thinking alone again I repeat this a team effort remember to talk to team all the time about all the actions and every action what you are taking practicing is one of the most important because you have decided what tools what softwares what platforms you are going to utilize to solve the problem study those technologies beforehand read available documents if you have many online tutorials are available these days go through them pass it on in the groups make a email group of some kind where you can pass on these and share this information with each other but most importantly practice the coding a lot of times before you actually come to that because you know for sure how it is going to work and then you can perform better during that period planning your work is important because you need those essentials at the time when you are going to perform in that hackathon technical essentials such as your laptops and batteries all the possible cables the pendrives all the internet dongles if you require the internet all have to be thought of in a situation because of that time frame you may not rely on the information that there is internet availability because when 50 teams are trying to access the internet the same time there could be situations where it will crash and you may not be able to jump on to the internet when you actually need it so it's better to have all the stuff with you whenever you are approaching that this comes under your planning phase apart from the technical essentials you can also for the team as well as for yourself for example you require a phone charger because you'll be away and you need to call make calls headphones if you are addicted to music because you would like to listen to the music and keep all of these things as a wish list before you actually pack for your hackathon remember that it's almost impossible to get anything at 3 a.m. midnight in whichever part of this particular city you are so plan it very very well apart from the technical requirements you also have to pack up your personal things so carry a extra pair of clothing because you may have to change there itself have a small maybe a thin sweater or a jacket if it gets colder in the night a small pillow or a thin blanket for a very short nap where you want to take up just bend on this table and have a small nap because you may not be able to afford a longer sleep during the hackathon carry lots of water bottles some snacks so to keep you just charged enough we have also seen sometimes good ideas come up if you have a chocolate maybe at the middle of the night and then you can just get back to your work so all these things will keep on helping you in getting the situation right when you are coming to the point where the hackathon starts what I was talking about is what you can do before you get into that hall so after you do that then actually the time comes where you have to perform and that I thought we will we will get experts in various ways to talk about it