Our Untold Story of Winning the MIT COVID-19 Challenge Hackathon

7 min readJun 2, 2020

I woke up on Monday morning, just to receive a flood of Slack messages on my phone from my hackathon team members: “WE WON!!”, “1st place too OMG”, and “I’m SOO HAPPY!!”, which literally made my day.

48 hours ago, 5 strangers from the United States (Philadelphia and St. Louis), Canada (Montreal), and Singapore met together online, formed a team, and collaborated to build a solution to help tackle the issue of nursing homes and assisted living facilities, which have accounted for more than 42% of all COVID-19 related facilities in the United States.

Finding the Problem

The hackathon kicked off with 39 unique problems pitched regarding critical issues requiring rapid solutions in nursing homes and long-term care (You can refer to my personal notes here). Soon after I introduced myself on the Slack channel, Trevor reached out and asked if I was interested in joining the team. I then met with Anthony, Sami, and Abby over a Zoom call. Friday evening US/Saturday morning Singapore time was spent on brainstorming the problems we wanted to solve. I helped facilitate the discussion with whiteboarding. Together, we came up with 7 ideas but had difficulties narrowing down to one problem. By the end of this brainstorming session, everyone on the team was tired, and we had to call it a day/night.

After this call, Trevor did more fact-finding and created a one-pager detailing specific issues, problem areas, and unmet needs from front-line workers based on this interview.

On Saturday morning US/evening Singapore, the team regrouped and continued the ideation. One of my team members, Anthony who is a soon to be nurse, experienced first-hand that certified nursing assistants and nurses are facing numerous challenges during the era of COVID-19. We created a persona named Jennifer, who is a certified nursing assistant and a low-income mother of two. Jennifer has an overwhelming patient load, feared to spread COVID-19 to her family, had limited experience working with infection control, and lacked access to expert advice and support from those working in long term care.

To better protect and reduce the anxiety of frontline health workers, here is the question we asked to challenge ourselves:

How might we help frontline health workers in nursing homes & assisted living facilities to better access COVID-specific training and vital information?

Finalizing Potential Solution

After a long Zoom call, I proposed to my team that we take a 30-minute break to prevent fatigue and to conduct competitive research and sketches on potential solutions. We went through our sketches, debating the pros and cons, and voted on the ideas that we collectively liked best. I then took all the good ideas and merged them into a new sketch (as shown below), and put it together on Figma for easier and faster feedback team collaboration. I am grateful that very quickly, the team provided feedback on the user flow, identified the remaining requirements and screens that needed to be designed, and filled in the proper copy as previously it was placeholder text.

After the feedback, I did a 1:1 with Anthony, our resident subject matter expert, to fill in my knowledge gap and gain a better understanding of mapping the problem to our user flow. We finalized the sketches, and I started designing V1 of our app. My early Sunday morning was spent designing the onboarding experience on our home screen while listening to the historic NASA x SpaceX launching astronauts to space after 9 years at 3:26 AM.

Introducing CareOwl

CareOwl is a web and mobile platform for COVID-19 specific educational resources, using gamification and peer-to-peer collaboration.

We believe that our platform, which provides peer to peer resource sharing and gamification incentives, will increase staff awareness of COVID-19 risk mitigation best practices, decrease staff anxieties, and improve patient care.

Below are the important ways with details on how we strive to achieve our goals with CareOwl:

Personalized Onboarding Experience

Onboarding needs to be personal in order to be impactful. It is make-or-break because frontline health workers might lose interest and not return to the app if we don’t get the onboarding process right. CareOwl can curate the relevant topics and answers based on how people identified themselves anonymously (no name required), and a clear overview of how the mobile app makes the learning easier for them.

Interactive and Engaging Learning Modules

The homepage is a feed of all the curated answers based on user’s recent searches, with the following features:

Search: Search for past questions, answers, or authors. By default, the search box expanded to show Recent Search and Topic Categories after clicking.
Answers: These carousel cards are swipeable horizontally to view more learning modules that are answered by healthcare experts to calm the minds of the nurses or caregivers, and rebuke myth when necessary.
Ask: Frontline health workers can submit a question to a CareOwl frontline expert if it hasn’t been asked before so that they can be reassured about their personal and family safety.

Expert-driven Advice Sharing

The answer provided by a CareOwl frontline expert is long and involves multiple steps, it will follow a content hierarchy with smaller cards with tidbit-like information that allow frontline health workers to have better focus and return to continue the remaining cards despite their busy schedule.

Gamification and Incentives

After frontline health workers like Jennifer completed a module on CareOwl, the platform will reward her with a free Starbucks drink, which will help keep her engaged with our platform.

The Impact

Our platform has an impact on both individual and public health. When frontline health workers are more informed and empowered, they can lead the way in improving patient care and decreasing the spread of COVID-19.

Special Thanks To

Organizers Alfonso Martinez, Stephanie MacConnell, Freddy Nguyen, Hannah Wright, and volunteers of the MIT COVID-19 Challenge. It is not an easy feat to host and coordinate for close to 2,000 participants globally.
Trevor: There wouldn’t be a CareOwl team if it weren’t you reaching out and bringing everyone together. Plus, emphasizing our plan to pilot and go-to-market, gamification as a way for ads monetization answers nailed the Q&A session.
Anthony: For being an amazing subject matter expert with your nursing background. Butter smooth speech, passion, and energy that let our hard work shine throughout the 3-minutes pitch.
Sami: Thankful for your thoughtfulness, making sure we completed the slides on time, your data science expertise, and metrics to evaluate the business model.
Abby: Tremendous contribution and commitment with the team from brainstorming, slide deck revision, practice pitches, script to Q&A roles split!
Team Lead Dr. Alana Dixson, Beth Negash, Mentors Dr. Alexander Bode, Kushal Gohil, Shirin Ahmed, Joel Kahn, Sama Kanbour, and judges for providing support, advice, and valuable feedback.
Illustration Credit: Shiny Happy’s author Brandon Mendoza
All team members for proofreading this journal!

It has been an exhausting weekend but I’m extremely proud of my team as everyone pushed over the line during this short and intense period to get CareOwl from 0 to 1. Moreover, I am grateful for my team members actively reaching out to mentors for feedback and practice pitches, which I didn’t get to join unfortunately due to timezone differences but it really takes the workload off my shoulder so I can focus on designing.

Thanks for making it to the end of this journal! Are you enjoying reading it? What are other exciting ideas that you might have thought of for helping nursing homes and caregivers?

Let me know by commenting below ⇣ or sending me a tweet on Twitter 🐦 and I’d be excited to join the conversation. Thanks for hitting the 💚 if you enjoyed this article!

Chip Dong Lim is a product designer at TradeGecko — a beautiful inventory software that powers the world’s small and medium businesses and connects the global supply chain. View more of his past design work at madebychip.com.