Next Gen Audience Response System
By Nina Mukherji

Karan Parikh and Sam Liu from Urbana Champaign, Illinois entered the YahooHackU, an international programming competition, simply to apply what they’d learnt at school, learn something new and meet many more interesting people! But they ended up with much more – a place at the finals of the prestigious contest and an iPad were just some of the things they walked away with.

Techgoss chats with Karan Parikh about the contest and what made their application unique.

Techgoss (TG): Tell us a bit about the contest?
Karan Parikh (KP): YahooHackU is a programming competition organized by Yahoo in universities across the United States and India. Students are given 24 hours to come up with innovative and exciting software products and then have about 90 seconds to do a live demo of their software for the judges and the audience. The winners from each college then battle it out in the finals. My friend Sam Liu and I won at the college level and will compete in the finals later this year.

TG: What made you enter this contest?
KP: These contests are a great place to apply what you learnt in class, acquire new development skills and of course meet lots of new people!

TG: What does your application do?
KP: Our software is a web application called ipClickr. We defined it as a 'mass audience polling software'. Universities and conferences use a device known as an iClicker. It allows students (or the audience) to vote in answers for a question being presented. The iClicker is linked to their university id so that they can get credit for their answers. Our software emulates all the functionality of the iClicker without the need for any specialized hardware or software. Instead of using an iClicker, students use their cell phones to text in their answers to a number given by us. Our software gathers their responses, gives the student points if their answer is right (their cell phone number serves as a unique identifier) and displays statistics about the question on the screen.

TG: What are the advantages of using your product?
KP: Our product has the advantage that it is completely free, adds to the core functionality of the iClicker, can be used from anywhere, and requires no additional hardware or software.

TG: When are the finals of the contest and are you preparing for it?
KP: The finals are to be held sometime in August this year, though the location has not yet been decided. We are both really busy with schoolwork so haven't given much thought to the finals as yet. I'm sure as we get closer to it, we will start thinking of possible ideas to build on during the finals.