codePannu as a tech partner for Ippodhu state elections results
May 2nd of 2021 was a politically significant day, as it was the election results day for 5 states –Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, Kerala, West Bengal and Assam. 2 weeks prior to it, a conversation with the CEO of Ippodhu.com drifted into the fascinating topic of the multiple layers of effort required in processing the election results before being presented to the public. Now, that would be a fantastic case study to show our students on the real–world application of programming. So we decided to collaborate, and codePannu became the tech partner of Ippodhu’s 2021 state election results, for its website and social media channels.
Why do they need a tech partner?
Presenting the election results accurately and fast, is ultimately a data and time game, with several challenges such as:
Different sources – Results keep pouring in from different sources in different formats and hence automation is mandatory to convert the data into one standard format.
Data Mapping – Election website publishes the results in terms of parties, however, public are focused on individual candidates and hence the mapping of party names from the website with the corresponding candidate names needs to be done for each constituency. Our pre-preparation involved parsing of the pdfs downloaded from election website and creating a database with the list of party-wise candidates by constituency. Also, parties form alliances and hence need the candidates need to be grouped by alliance, to present the overall numbers.
Time sensitivity – Data on the election website refreshes almost every 15 minutes and needs to be extracted often. Our preparation involved looking at the format of the prior election results to understand the web page layout and wrote a script to take a snapshot of the page and extract the result.
Interesting zones – Audience will be keen on constituencies with high profile candidates such as ex-ministers, current ministers, repeat candidates of a constituency, unpredictable zones with neck to neck competition etc. and hence need to be reported more often with high accuracy.
We are talking about data from 5 states with 4-5 alliances each, for 800+ constituencies. Considering the challenges, technical expertise is crucial for any media brand. On the D-day, even as we stumbled across a few challenges, we published slide after slide of results for 16 straight hours, until the final result for every constituency in every state was announced.
The Outcome
We were able to show our students, an example of solving a real-world problem using programming, who otherwise used to think that programming is only to create games and apps.
We see brands partnering with space companies to provide satellite data for their students. Why go that far (literally)? Our students are beginning to start using free APIs, which gives them the opportunity to use the substantial volume of data available on the internet for free.
What next?
The collaboration happened when codePannu had just become its journey in the edTech space and our students were beginners to programming. When the next election comes around, we will have a sufficient number of students who would find it super interesting and would love to contribute to the process. Imagine watching the results on TV/website that were processed by school students.
We are also open to more collaborations which can be case studies for our students. Do you have a use case we could collaborate on, or would like to hire our students as interns?
Join us today and let’s give a strong foundation in programming for kids!