Jul 24, 2020

Noosphere Organizes Various Virtual Events During the Quarantine

The coronavirus pandemic has affected Noosphere’s schedule of events for 2020. Some have been postponed for the fall, while for others we were able to either join or create an online format. We will talk about each of them below.

Educational webinars from Noosphere Engineering School

Educational courses and other online events gained popularity with the onset of quarantine. Noosphere also encourages such activities because they help to acquire new skills and knowledge without leaving your home. Therefore, since April, we are launching educational webinars based on the Noosphere Engineering School. 

Noosphere Engineering School has already organized 9 webinars on various topics. The lecturers were mentors of the Noosphere Engineering School labs in different cities, as well as other experts in the field.  

About 450 people joined the webinars. We discussed many issues together: investor pitch deck presentation, real-time operating system (RTOS), AR project development, protecting intellectual property, features of Angular framework, green energy, a new startup launch after failure, and startup mechanics from concept to product. We won’t stop there; and plan to continue covering even more topics this year.       

NASA Space Apps COVID-19 Challenge 

On May 30-31, NASA, together with ESA, JAXA, and other partners, held a global virtual hackathon dedicated to tackling the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. As a regular local organizer of the NASA Space Apps Challenge since 2017, Noosphere assisted by organizing the virtual edition of the hackathon, NASA Space Apps COVID-19 Challenge. 

The hackathon challenges focused on one of several topics: learning about the virus and its spread using space-based data; local response/change and solutions; impacts of COVID-19 on the Earth system/Earth system response; and economic opportunity, impact, and recovery during and after COVID-19. More than 15,000 tech and space enthusiasts from 150 countries joined the hackathon. They formed over 2,000 virtual teams to solve 1 of the 12 tasks from the organizers in 48 hours.    

All the participants have already received certificates of appreciation for joining the NASA Space Apps COVID-19 Challenge. The six global winners will be announced in early August. They will visit one of NASA’s space centers. 

Noosphere Chess IT Cup

Thanks to restrictions on offline sports competitions, Noosphere has organized several online chess tournaments, titled the Noosphere Chess IT Cup. The tournament gathered numerous logic game enthusiasts from all over Ukraine on lichess.org platform. Participants were from the following companies: Commercegate, ISD, Privatbank, Molfar, Firefly Aerospace, Yellow Stone, SoftServe, Govitall, Ignited, Together Networks, SupporTec, Absolutist Ltd, VRG Soft and Leobit. Students from Oles Honchar Dnipro National University, Lviv Polytechnic National University, “Step” Сomputer Academy, Mate Academy, and A.S. Popov Odesa National Academy of Communications, as well as freelancers, also joined the tournaments. 

The winning participants received amazing branded gifts from Noosphere: power banks, key chains, and sets of reflective sports stickers.  

Mafia IT Cup

Continuing a series of online activities during the quarantine, Noosphere organized its first online Mafia IT Cup. The game gathers its fans from Maxima Labs, Traffic DNA, Noosphere, AdsBridge, FEODAL.online, Boxmode, Freelance, Wezom, CherryPie, Together Networks, and Koomba UG. Joining the participants were students from Dnipro Polytechnic National Technical University, National Aerospace University “Kharkiv Aviation Institute”, and Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University, as well as industry freelancers. 

We held a few qualifying matches before the final match. The most talented “mafiosos” claimed the victory and won awesome Noospherean prizes: polo T-shirts, towels, and sports bottles. 

Noosphere hopes to return to usual live events in the near future. In the meantime, we continue developing our virtual activities.