Happenings

RMUN 2016

I take a deep breath and start, “Good morning to all, it is my pleasure to welcome you all to the Riverside Model UN. I am Janani Sampath and I am the Secretary General for this year’s RMUN….” Many people think being a Secretary General is an easy job, but let me assure you, it is not. I was the Secretary General for this year’s RMUN, which took place in Riverside Public School in Kotagiri. My ‘job’ description was to organize and manage the conference.

For those of you who do not know what MUN is, it stands for Model United Nations. It is a simulation of the United Nations. The Executive Board comes up with topics that are currently trending and relevant to us. The participants are called delegates, and each delegate represents a country that is assigned to her/him. The delegates have to be well-versed with their country’s foreign policy, and under all circumstances they should stand by it.  Delegates should only express their country’s view on the topic and never their own opinion. MUN makes us conscious of what is happening in the world around us and also makes us reflect on our lives. Besides, it helps us in developing countless skills, such as public speaking, leadership qualities, team work, problem solving.

The committees that we had this year were the United Nation Security Council (UNSC) and the United Nation Human Rights Commission (UNHRC). The topic for UNSC was ‘Cyber Warfare: The New Frontier of International Conflict’ and for UNHRC, it was ‘Terrorist Profiling: Xenophobia, Islamophobia and Other Discriminatory Practices and Attitudes.’

We felt that cyber warfare was a topic that needed discussing as in this day and age, we as a generation are more interconnected than ever. We exchange ideas, information and media online. Now, we can conveniently store all our data even on a small USB. On the flip side, all our information is available to be exploited by those who know how. So we felt that it was high time we looked for a solution to this problem to protect our private information. Our hope was that the committee would come up with a practical solution without compromising on our Right to Privacy.

In many western countries, Islamophobia and xenophobia seem to have taken a strong hold on people. This creates bias against Muslims and other minorities. We hoped that the committee would come up with solutions that were suitable for the modern world that would curb these biases.

Twenty-two students, mainly from class 11, along with four teachers attended the conference. We left from school on the 28^th of November; the conference happened over two days, the 29th and 30^th of November. The conference was hosted by Riverside Public School. On the 29^th, the conference started at 9 am and ended by 4:15 pm. After the committee closed for the day, the Riversiders put up a theater performance, an adaptation of the well-known comedy-mystery movie The Pink Panther. After that we had a bonfire, sang songs, danced and had dinner. It was a memorable evening. The next day the committee resumed again by 9am. The 2^nd day was full of surprises for the delegates as well as for the Executive Board, because our teachers came up with interesting crises topics for us to solve. The delegates solved the problems that came their way, and even managed to pass a resolution paper!

We closed the conference with a closing ceremony. Each committee had a best delegate and special mention for each of the schools.

UNSC:

RIVERSIDE:

• Special Mention- Vaibhav
• Best Delegate (shared by)- Sanjay Vardhan and Jai Mittal

ISHA HOME SCHOOL:

• Special Mention- Srinidhi Meenakshi
• Best Delegate – Mohan Reddy Gadhe

UNHRC:

RIVERSIDE:

• Special Mention- Kevin Anderson
• Best Delegate- Ryan Sathish

ISHA HOME SCHOOL:

• Special Mention- Arvind Venkatesh Krishnan
• Best Delegate (shared by) – Shreya M., Mahima Gupta

This conference overall was an enriching experience. We made lots of new friends and had fun, but we also learned a lot about current affairs, and more importantly got an opportunity to face our fear of public speaking. Though this was my last MUN in school, I am looking forward to participating in more MUN conferences in college.

– Janani Sampath

IHS Students Attend NASSCOM 2016

Upon winning the Game Jam Titans 2016, the Video Game (VG) TED students were offered the opportunity to attend a 3-day VG developer’s conference held by the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM). The NASSCOM Game Developer Conference 2016 took place between the 10th and 12^th of November, in Hyderabad, during the school mid-year break.

Professionals, from all over the world, usually attend the conference, which provides an opportunity for various budding game developers in India to interact with experts in the VG industry. Many studios attend this conference as well, and each studio has its own booth. Representatives from universities attend the conference, too, and talk to students like us. They advise students about the various careers in the industry. Throughout the day, famous individuals in the industry give talks in the adjacent halls.

We met with Ayman anna on the 9th in Hyderabad. We could not attend the conference the first day, since it was only for professionals. On the 9th and 10th we researched about all the individuals and studios attending the conference to make our individualized schedules. On the 11^th, we arrived at the venue, Novotel Hotel, where we were given our ID cards. We proceeded to the main hall where all the booths were located. Our school had 2 stalls, wherein we set up all our laptops to showcase the various games we had developed in IHS. After 30 minutes, the hall was flooded with guests. Many visited our booths and were quite amazed with our presentations. Some of us stayed back in the booths, while others went to attend the various talks.

Each talk was approximately 1-2 hours long, followed by a question answer session. After we had attended our chosen talk, we would proceed back to the stall and swap with the students at the stall. Some time in our schedule was allotted to roaming around the hall and visiting the other stalls. During this time, I found many cool stalls. Some studios invited people to play their games in their stall.  That was our favorite type of stall.  The conference ended at 8:00pm that day, and after dinner, we returned to the hotel feeling tired, and crashed the moment we saw our beds.

The second day was similar, but we had a little more free time as there were lesser talks. When we visited the stalls that second day, we got many amazing posters. We also got to talk to many university students, and learnt a lot about the best universities in India. We spoke to a few individuals who were running studios; one of the studios even gave Harsshavardhan and myself an internship offer after graduation! The event concluded around 6 that evening.

Overall, the trip was a great experience. We learnt things we could not have learnt elsewhere. We also learnt what it takes to be in a VG studio, and what challenges developers go through to produce those discs that we see in stores.

– Sai Shekhar

JAGA is released!

 

We are the Isha Home School Video Game club. We were formed in 2010 and started out by creating small games to get the hang of the various software that we were using. Our first main game was called ‘Volt Attack’, which was a third person ‘jumper’ in which the objective was to jump over bars of electricity that shot out of sci-fi machines, and the ‘jumper’ had to avoid being hit by those bars before time ran out.

It wasn’t until the year 2014 that we decided to take up a huge project, which we called ‘Jaga’. ‘Jaga’ originally started out as a game where you were a chemist and you had some chemicals. The game involved mixing chemicals to form different substances, to overcome obstacles and reach some goal. This idea, somehow became an adventure game based in the Mahabharata time, where you are boy of around 16 trying to save your brother from certain death.

Development started in early 2015, and by the first week of April the prototype for one level was ready. We realized that we still had a lot of work to do and time was becoming a constraint. The game was finally playable by June of 2016, but there were still plenty of bugs. After 3 months of fixing and refining, the game was ready. Here is the product of 2 ½ years of hard work and commitment. We hope you enjoy the game as much as we did developing it.

Personal Experiences
Throughout the process of ‘Jaga’, we had many experiences. Most of them were good. The game allowed us to discover what it means to develop a functional and working game, and how hard it is to make something, even as simple as a falling rock. Watching how art, programming, and level design came together to create something like this, was truly beautiful. We had some bad experiences as well, doing things that we didn’t like, but they were things that had to be done. Here are a few words from some of the developers of ‘Jaga.’

Sai: The grind of developing the game, taught me a lot more than any video on YouTube could.

Harssha: I had a fun experience making it and I learnt loads from it. It was worth the time we spent on it and I am looking forward to our next game.

Karthik: At the start, I thought that we wouldn’t get anywhere, but we managed to pull it off. It was a pleasure to work with my friends on something that was important to us.

Kailash: Being part of the team was really awesome. Working on it was really cool. It taught me how to fight against bugs.

Kush: I faced many challenges designing the levels, as it was hard to figure out how to keep the player engaged. But I think that it was an experience that I’ll never forget, and I’m proud to say that I was part of the project.

Click here to download and play the game!