Kathmandu: LOCUS 2020, the 17th National Technological Festival, is scheduled to be held on 31st January to 2nd February, 2020 on the theme "Technology for Sustainability" at IOE, Pulchowk Campus.
LOCUS is a technological festival organized jointly by students of Electronics, Computer and Electrical Departments of Pulchowk Campus. This year LOCUS is being organized for the 17th time.
Every year LOCUS conducts many skill development programs, competitive hardware, software and electrical events among students from various national level colleges as well as non-competitive events like exhibition, seminars, paper presentation, gaming competitions, simulation competition and many more providing a platform for interaction and healthy competition among creative minds in technical fields and marketing management.
Leading up to the main exhibition LOCUS has organized a myriad of events to kindle ideas and aid in technological innovations. The following are the pre-events that the LOCUS has organized so far.
Workshops
LOCUS 2020 officially kicked off with record breaking participation from students all over Nepal in its first three skill based workshops for the year, namely, Hardware Fellowship, Software Fellowship and Home Electrification. The events were meticulously designed for beginners who aspired to pursue technology in the future. Every event was guided by a syllabus prepared with utmost care to provide the right learning curve for the students.
Hardware Fellowship, a 10-day workshop, saw a total participation of 251 students who were introduced to hardware simulation, bread-boarding, soldering, Arduino, and other basics of electronics armed with a pragmatic teaching method. Software Fellowship, not unlike the Hardware Fellowship, introduced a total of 91 fresh-men year students to modern programming paradigms such as Python, web development and a primer to database management systems. Similarly, Home Electrification equipped 110 students with basic skills and solutions to power homes, within the 7 days of the workshop.
Theme Release
LOCUS 2020 committee organized its Theme Release program on December 27, 2019, which was graced by the presence of personalities from United Nations Nepal, namely, Ms. Moon Gurung from UN Volunteers and Mr. Subhash Nepali, SDG advisor from UN Resident Coordinator's office. Their presence was warranted by the partnership of LOCUS 2020 with UN Nepal wherein UN offers LOCUS guidance in its strategies formulation. Other dignitaries present in the program were The Campus Chief of Pulchowk Campus, Mr. Laxman Paudel, HoD of Department of Electronics and Computer Engineering, Dr. Surendra Shrestha, Prof. Dr. Subarna Shakya and Dr. Arun Kumar Timilsina. The main theme of LOCUS exhibition this year is 3 of 17 UN SDGs:
- 3rd SDG: Good Health and Well being
- 7th SDG: Affordable and Clean Energy
- 11th SDG: Sustainable Cities and Communities
Robotic Operating System
LOCUS introduced a new pre-event on 6th of January, 2020, the Robotic Operating System (ROS) Workshop, facilitated by Nepal Future Labs. The event saw an exciting participation from 28 selected people coming from different walks of life to learn about the robotics middleware software.
Drone Seminar
As a build up to one of our main events, Dronacharya, we organized a Seminar on Drones and its areas of Development followed by a panel discussion on the same, on 13th of January 2020. The seminar hosted experts and guests from sponsors like FuseMachines, Madhukaa Drone Service and Himalaya Solutions along with overwhelming number of Drone enthusiast.
Energy Hackathon
Energy Hackathon, a 4-day event, formally commenced on January 16, 2020 to encourage students to ideate and hack solutions to raging problems in the energy and electricity sector of Nepal. After successful two mentorship sessions, the event is yet to be concluded.
Itonics Hack-a-Week
Inaugurated on January 19, 2020, Itonics Hack-a-week was a week-long event in which 15 teams, each with 3-4 innovative participants, engaged in collaboration to fashion out product in forms of software development, business modelling and ambitious marketing campaign, revolving around the designated themes, the themes for this year being “Tourism”, “Games and Entertainment”, “Smart and Sustainable Cities” and “Health and Education”.
Girls to Code
To celebrate women in technology, LOCUS along with Girls-In-Tech organized a women-only, two day boot camp on cloud computing and leadership. 58 participants took to Amazon Web Services to learn the basics of cloud computing on 20th and 21st of January, 2020.
+2 Quiz
+2 Quiz, unlike any other events of LOCUS, brought together 15 teams of +2 students in a friendly and a rather educational competition. NIST College, Lainchaur bagged the winner title, while Katmandu Multiple College won the title of the 1st Runner Up.
Walkathon
More than 250 students walked around the major place of Kathmandu on January 25, 2020. The event aimed to raise awareness regarding gender equality that doubled down as a promotional pre-event for our SDG-based main event.
The other events that shall be organized on the three days of our exhibition are:
- Dronacharya
- RoboPop
- RoboWarZ
- Code Camp
- Code Jam
The successful pre-events only make evident the true virtue of our motto, Connect, Compete and Collaborate. Therefore, I n the capacity of our Media Partner, the LOCUS 2020 committee urges you to convey our messages to the general public and help us make the LOCUS 2020, 17th National Technological Festival, a grand success. We would also like take this report to call upon the Engineering colleges, Hardware and Software Companies and related authorities to contribute to sustainable development by joining hands with us.
