Tiara 2018

Backstory

St. Joseph Engineering College (SJEC) is an engineering college located in Vamanjoor, Mangalore, Karnataka. The college is known for its excellent standard of teaching along with good social interactions. SJEC offers four NBA Accredited B.E. Programs namely Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science and Engineering, Electronics and Communication Engineering, and Electrical and Electronics Engineering. Additionally, SJEC offers Civil Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning BE Programs, and two Post Graduate MBA and MCA Programs as well.

Every year, SJEC hosts a National Level Technical Fest called Tiara where students (from SJEC and from colleges across India) can participate in various technical competitions across multiple departments as a way to put their technical skills to the test and also win top prizes. To participate in these technical competitions, students have to pre-register by visiting registration booths during their breaks stationed at a specific place in the college campus. This caused two major issues.

  1. Firstly, it led to a large gathering of 1000+ students around the registration booths trying to register for their desired events within their 10-20 minute break. Only a quarter of the students that had gathered would succeed in completing their registration and most of them had to come back in their next break to do the same all over again. Additionally, the pre-registration process wasn't accessible to potential participants from other colleges.
  2. Second, the registration process required a great deal of manual intervention, as well contributed to a large amount of paper waste which was generated as a result of the application forms maintained per applicant.

In 2018 Softrixz was the technical sponsor for the Tiara TechFest and having identified these issues, set out to solve them using modern technology.

Our Approach

A way to solve both the above problems is to move registrations online. But now we need to choose which platform we are going to build for i.e. the web or mobile.

Although the web would ensure a consistent experience across all devices it would prevent users from accessing relevant information when offline (such as their registrations). Keeping these things in mind we chose to develop mobile apps for both the Android and iOS platforms, as it would enable students from both, SJEC and other colleges to seamlessly register for their events effortlessly, at any given time, without having to leave their classrooms.

Even with the mobile apps, we decided that a website would still be required so as to relay key information to those who wanted to know more about Tiara and familiarize themselves with the details of the various events without having to download the mobile app.

What We Achieved

As part of our sponsorship, Softrixz provided SJEC with

  1. End-user facing mobile apps for both the Android and iOS platforms
  2. A website for non-mobile users
  3. An Android app for Tiara Coordinators to manage registrations.

The mobile app provided a consistent experience across both Android & iOS and allowed users to

  1. view the latest updates
  2. view the schedule of different events
  3. register for events organized by different departments
  4. view nearby prime locations
  5. and manage their registrations.

We completely eliminated the use of paper, and reduced the overall paper consumption to only 2% as that of the previous year, there was no crowding at the registration booths as most registrations were done online, and the manual effort involved in the whole process was reduced by 99%.

What SJEC says about our work

Sathyendra Bhat Photo

Sathyendra Bhat

Assistant Professor @ St. Joseph Engineering College

Well, it will not be an understatement when I say if TIARA 2018 was organized successfully by St Joseph Engineering College (SJEC), a large chunk of credit should be attributed to its technology partner in Softrixz. A bunch of dedicated individuals from Softrixz were instrumental in providing tech support to the college to digitize our National Level Tech Fest. Having struggled a great deal in preceding years to effectively manage the registrations for the fest, the partnership with Softrixz was a boon in terms of digitizing the entire process. Apart from making the registration process paperless, the website and mobile apps developed by the team were well appreciated by all stakeholders. Being the technical coordinator of the fest, it was a delight to work with these hardworking youngsters and I can assure you that anyone who chooses to work with Softrixz will have this pleasant experience that SJEC has had!

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