Code a Pookalam 2.0
2.0
Kerala’s oldest art form, drawn with a language instead of petals. Ninety minutes, a blank canvas, and the Joy library. No flowers required.
Petals down in
Saturday, 22 August 2026
Seats
Registration open
The brief
You never place a petal.
You describe the rule.
Joy gives you shapes and one idea: repeat something around a centre. That happens to be exactly how a pookalam is built. Write eight lines, and the pattern falls out on its own.
- Nothing to install
- The whole competition runs in your browser.
- Python is enough
- If you can write a loop, you can draw one of these.
- One sitting
- Design, code and submit inside the competition window.
- Every entry saved
- Publish it and it lands in the public gallery.
from joy import *
petal = ellipse(w=52, h=150, fill="#F0A500")
ring = petal | repeat(18, rotate(20))
core = circle(r=44, fill="#EC2A7B")
dots = circle(x=0, y=96, r=9, fill="#F4E6C8") | repeat(12, rotate(30))
result = ring + core + dotsPrizes
₹3,000 on the table
Participation certificates for everyone who submits a sketch.
Cash prizes for the top two
Winner and runner-up certificates
Featured on the gallery wall
Judging
Pretty counts. So does how you got there.
A pookalam hard-coded as three hundred circles and one built from a single petal and a rotation can look identical. The second scores higher. That’s the whole competition.
Visual design
40%Symmetry, colour harmony, how convincingly it reads as a pookalam.
Code craft
30%Use of transforms, cycles and repetition rather than brute-force coordinates.
Originality
20%A pattern we haven’t seen five times already.
Complexity
10%Ambition of the composition relative to the time given.
Bring a laptop. Leave with something nobody has drawn before.
Open to all departments and all years. Registration open