TDGi Hack for Education - Team White - Red and Blue Hats experience

On the 7th of September, together with several teammates, I went to the TDGi Hack for Education as “Team White, Red and Blue Hats”.

My first challenge was to find teammates — luckily, I know people who are passionate about Microsoft technology, who were eager to give this is a go even though most of us have little to no experience of these kind of events, so thank you to:

Jackie Walker

Aidan O’Leary

Samm Hitches

Kieran Holmes

Darren Tang

Josh Vicente

Read below the team’s perspective of the events (and a massive thank you to Those Dynamics Guys for starting and organising these amazing events):

Samm:

Overall the day was a resounding success, with lots of learning, fun and the occasional beverage. I will try to convince you why you should be representing your team at the next event…

Obvious reasons to attend:

• Do something good to benefit others
• Collaborate and learn
• Get outside your comfort zone
• Have a ton of fun

The hackathon is designed to push you outside your comfort zone by giving you a seemingly impossible task within the time limit. The trial by fire approach is a sure-fire way to learn hard and fast, and it allows you to understand the areas you may be lacking in knowledge.

I look forward to seeing you at the next one.

Darren:

The hackathon was a great experience and I would highly recommend whoever can spare their weekend for a couple of hours to join in and get involved in something great! The best part of the event was the team bonding. In these types of quick solution events, you must be able to communicate and work with your team on all fronts.

Our team worked well together to create the solution and communication was always at the core of what we did that day. It was great to work on a project which helped the educational sector with our truancy solution. Hopefully, some ideas can be taken from our solution to have a greater impact on the educational industry.

Joshua:

What an experience! My first time at an event like this, I was very excited (and more than a bit nervous) to get stuck in and build something fresh with what I know whilst also learning new things along the way.

As it turns out, I did not need to be nervous at all; not only was my entire team warm and welcoming to a newcomer such as myself, but the gracious hosts and friendly competitors treated us like colleagues. I felt at home in a working environment of like-minded individuals; it was an excellent experience that I will very happily repeat.

We had a lot of good internal discussions before beginning development. We wanted to create a portal to allow parents to monitor their child’s attendance and academic progress (objective 1).

The ability for a parent to mark their child as absent for the day and provide a reason to create a paper trail for both the home and the school. Linking this to an attendance monitor to be used in the classroom would allow teachers to see authorized absences as soon as they are reported (objective 2). As the team’s industry expert, I gave input where I could on how things should be structured to make the most sense for both teachers and parents to use.

There were a few technical issues which we attempted to circumvent but ultimately, the team collaborated and decided to reduce the scope of our project by rethinking the portal concept and switching to PowerApps. Unfortunately, we ran out of time before we were able to produce results but we had a functional backend which I was very pleased with. Coming away with what I’ve learned from this experience (and what I hope to learn over the next 12 months), I’m excited to try again next year and produce something truly exceptional with the team.

Go Red White and Blue Hats!

Jackie:

The hackathon for me was a great day however it was also a day for lots of lessons learned.

Our experience started with us being on the back foot slightly as we never received the objectives the day before, when it seems all other teams had.

However, I did still really enjoy the day and would love to take part in another hackathon, only making sure all the lessons learned from this experience were applied

• Meet earlier
• More planning of the design, taking into consideration the skill-set of team members involved.
• Only start building once a full process design mapped out and a task list created of all steps required to achieve the design.
• Ensure everyone knows and understand what we are trying to achieve so we can work more cohesively together.

This was my first hackathon so was not sure what to expect and was quite nervous, however, everyone we met from the other teams was friendly and we all enjoyed it, and would all do it again.

Aidan:

On a sunny Saturday morning, I decided to spend the day inside by attending the TDGi Hack for Education. The day started with the team meeting beforehand and discussing ideas of what we think the event will be like. We then made our way to the event.

When it kicked off, we were given the option to choose from a few different aspects related to the education industry. Our team decided to work on a system where a teacher could log into Microsoft Dynamics 365 and update information about their students and how they were doing. It included a service to notify parents when their children are absent from class, and a portal for parents to log into to view their children’s progress.

We started by designing the data model on paper. At the end of the event we completed the backend teacher system, although the power portal didn’t get finished (this was mainly due to me trying to learn most of how it works during the event).

I had a great time and thoroughly enjoyed it. The event was a good team-building exercise and gave us all a chance to get to know each other better while working on a common goal.

The event gave us the chance to network with and meet a lot of other people that are part of the Dynamics 365/Power Platform industry. Another positive aspect of the event was that I was given the chance to work with Power Portals which I don’t usually use so it was a good learning experience. Next time it would be nice to explore and maybe include the new AI Builder in our solution.

Overall the event was a fun experience and I will be attending the next one.

David:

This was my second time going to this type of event and first as team captain. We faced some challenges, however, after gaining some experience and having fun, we’re all raring to go for the next one!

Join the Capgemini Microsoft team, open roles here.