Pre-Felicity 2021 Events

This article covers the events that took place or began before the stipulated dates of Felicity (25th to 27th February 2021).

Googlit

The TV Room Quiz Club(TVQRC) organized Googlit, a relatively straightforward quiz in terms of execution. It allowed the participants to call upon a person’s knowledge of Google. The quiz lasted one day and consisted of twenty-five questions. 

The quiz was supposed to test the participants’ googling skills, which has gained importance in today’s generation. Many teachers avoid giving students everything on the plate and instead insist the students learn concepts themselves through the internet.  

Shreevignesh, a TVRQC coordinator, told us, “Ever since quizzes became online, it has become too hard to prevent participants from googling the answers. So the quiz was conducted in the manner that we encouraged the participants to google and find information. However, there were no direct questions in the set. It was only possible to answer the questions if the participant could connect the various clues and dots.”

Questions of the quiz were prepared by a college alumnus, Harish Krishna, who was one of the founders of TVRQC. The TVRQC coordinators reviewed the problems later on

Zest

This year, the Dance Crew conducted a first inter-college dance competition, Zest, which had three categories – Western Solo, Classical Solo, and Group Dance. 

It received more than a hundred submissions from colleges all over India. Participants were given about two weeks’ days to submit their performances. There was also a provision that allowed participants to submit old dance videos if they were time-constrained or had challenges in recording or editing. The time limit for classical and western solo performances was 60 seconds to 180 seconds, while group performances’ time limit was 90 seconds to 300 seconds.

Each team in the group dance category had a minimum of 4 individuals and a maximum of 10 individuals in the team. Team members were asked not to gather to shoot the video and instead were told to edit the video to have multiple people on the screen.

For the initial screening, all the submissions were uploaded on The Dance Crew’s YouTube channel, where people could view the performances and like them. The top 10 submissions in each category were then shortlisted based on the number of likes on the uploaded YouTube videos.

The shortlisted videos were then sent to judges Raveena Choudary, with years of experience as a dancer, performer, and choreographer, and Mr. Jayachandran, a practitioner of dance and a Lecturer at Center for Exact Humanities, IIIT-H. The videos were judged based on their choreography, quality of execution, and synchronization

Debate Tournament

The Debate Society of IIITH organized its most significant event of the year, the Felicity Debate, on 21st February 2021. The event was spread over three days and comprised three rounds. 

This was a parliamentary debate that followed the standard Asian Parliamentary format. In this format, teams of 3 participate in the formal debate to convince the adjudicator, a common educated man, on their side of the argument. The debates were conducted on Discord. Each team used the three tenets of persuasion – ethos, pathos, and logos. 

The various pillars of debating came to the foreground throughout the tournament. The adjudicators were impressed at the general level of the debates. They were also encouraged to see many first-time debaters, indicating the growing debating community in IIIT-H.

Sixteen teams locked horns against each other in 3 qualifying rounds. Four teams with the highest number of points made it to the semifinals. The motions ranged from a variety of topics, ranging from history to fantasy. The tournament saw the majority of participation coming from the first year and second year batches. 

In the qualifying rounds, the teams were given 20 minutes to prepare their arguments and structure, followed by the two sides arguing for their house. The adjudicator then announced the results and provided feedback, explaining the reasons behind their decisions.

The tournament was designed with beginners in mind. Prizes were awarded to the top 3 teams

The Wall

The Art Society of IIIT-H launched its flagship event of 2021 on 14th February, named “The Wall.” The society collaborated with the Programming Club for the effective setup and maintenance of the canvas on a website.

Painting murals was an honored tradition passed on year after year conducted during Felicity. The online semester did not serve as a hurdle for the determined community, which decided to go for a digital form of art: “Pixel Art.”  

Pixel Art is a form of digital art where an image is obtained by coloring each pixel with an individual color which gives it a unique visual style. Individual pixels serve as the building blocks that make up the image. The effect is a graphical style similar to mosaic art, cross-stitch, and other embroidery techniques.

The event was inspired by a worldwide internet social and collaborative experiment conducted by the community on Reddit. Each user was allowed to modify one pixel on the canvas with a cooling period varying between 5 and 20 minutes.
Click here to know more about the experiment

More than 320 artists painted on the Felicity 2021 wall, all collaborating to fixate unique art on a 250,000 pixels large canvas. 

The website on which the canvas was open for coloring also maintained a leaderboard, maintaining a count of the number of pixels placed by each digital artist.