Winning my first Hackathon

01 Dec 2016

Saturday 26 and Sunday 27 November I competed in my first Hackathon. I was in a team with a total of 4 students from my school. The competition happened here in Italy, in Vicenza. It was amazing, and it was a success (at least for us).

We had 3 topics to hack on

• acquired disability
• electric mobility/smart city/traffic management/etc…
• “interactive” cultural places (museums, etc..)

We competed in the electric mobility category, which was coincidently the one with the biggest prize. It’s to say that we were luck to have few competitors (a lot of people went for the acquired disability and the interactive culture categories), but I think we played well anyway.

With just a bit of trouble and uncertainties, we invented in the 24 hours hacking marathon a simple and cheap system that aims to increase the road safety and to optimize the traffic flow (I’m sorry I won’t go into details, but we’re thinking about concretely developing this project in the next years).

By the way I think our cleverness was to understand what the judges were looking for. I saw a lot, and by a lot I mean at least 90% of the partecipants, developing a full Android app or a full electronic prototype in 24 hours (which, by the way, is admirable). But the judges were looking for innovation and original projects, not skills or “working speed”. Who was looking for this stuff were the sponsors of the event (we’re talking about Microsoft, Tesla Motors, Cisco, and on). The only sad thing is that, because we didn’t build anything complex (just a simple small-scale demo with some LEDs and a few lines of Arduino code), I didn’t show off all my knowledge and interest in a lot of (for a 18yo student here in Italy) advanced topics, like ARM MCUs programming, machine learning and more. It would have been nice being contacted by many companies like the ones above, and this is the only thing I regret about the hackathon.

In general, however, the event was amazing for me: I was like a child who just received a truck full of toys for his birthday (I think everyone has their childish moments sometimes) and I will for sure partecipate in all the Hackathons I’ll find from now on.

I’ll also for sure update the blog when we decide what to do with our idea, I really can’t wait to show off what we created.