First-ever GDSC Europe Ideathon
Do you remember how you started your Solution Challenge journey this year? Let’s take a look back on how it all began with the GDSC ideathon we prepared for students across Europe.
I especially love the prize the winners received for their amazing idea.
Table of Content:
- Ideathon for the Solution Challenge
- 5 Benefits from participating in the Ideathon
- The agenda
- 4 Tips for hosting an ideathon
Ideathon for the Solution Challenge
The Solution Challenge is an annual competition hosted by Google Developers. Competitors aim to create a technical solution for one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Google Developer Student Club members from all over the world can participate.
We know beginnings are hard and scary, so the GDSC mentors for Europe decided to help students to get started with their projects by hosting a GDSC Ideathon. During the event students were taught how to come up with new great ideas and plan how to execute them.
Some participants signed up to the event as a group, some got matched by us based on their interests, others met virtually during the networking session. Nobody was left alone!
What’s in it for the students?
Besides the opportunity to meet and network with new people across Europe, students gained many more awesome goodies:
- Innovation workshop — How to come up with products that solve problems
- Technical workshops — How to get started with popular and useful technologies
- Private mentoring sessions with experts
- Certificate of participation — To show off on LinkedIn
- 200$ worth of Google Cloud Platform credits for the winning group. This is more than enough to kickstart any kind of tech project!
The agenda
We started the event with some keynotes and a fun icebreaker. We asked some silly questions like “Do you prefer cats or dogs’’ and “What is your dream travel destination?”. All of these were just to make the audience feel more comfortable to participate in chat.
After that we invited Elene Darjania (Head of Experimentation at UNDP Accelerator Labs) and Tini Mamuchashvili (Consultant for Innovation & Technology at Ilia State University) to the stage. They gave valuable insights about the current state of the education systems around the world and explained how crucial it is to achieve the UN goals. For example, did you know that 6 out of 10 children are not achieving a minimum level of proficiency in reading and math?
Tini also provided an excellent workshop on how to find problems around us and how to create creative solutions for them. By the end of the workshop she treated us with a brain-teasing exercise where she showed two unrelated pictures and asked the audience to invent an imaginary product that could use both.
It is definitely a great tool to get the creative juices flowing.
After a short break, it was time to get more techy. Three technical workshops were ahead of us. We specifically chose some of the most common technologies used for creating technical products. Fortunately, we were able to invite industry experts to provide these workshops.
Majid Hajian (Google Developer Expert & Flutter community leader) introduced the audience to Flutter by working on a mobile application from scratch.
Negar Vahid (CTO at Elaratech) spoke about how to get started with machine learning projects. She introduced several concepts and popular algorithms used for classifications. She also explained where to find great datasets and even how to create your own.
Rich Rose (Google Cloud Lab Architect) provided a hands-on workshop for using Google Cloud and serverless architecture.
All speakers and technical mentors stayed for a fruitful Q&A session during which the students asked anything they wanted regarding their ideas and possible implementations.
Last but not least, we split the audience among mentorship rooms. Each group of students received 1:1 mentorship in the following areas: Machine Learning, Data warehousing, Architecture, Cyber security, Blockchain, GCP, Data Science, Flutter and Project Management.
It was a unique opportunity for students to get professional consultation about architecture design, feature prioritization and timeline management.
Students and mentors had productive conversations together and they even continued to chat after the event was officially over. As a mentor myself, I would say that the groups I supported this year had very intriguing ideas.
When the mentorship sessions were over, the groups had 24 hours to submit their ideas.
Do you want to host your own GDSC Ideathon?
Here’s what we learned from working on a global-scale event:
- Community leads would love to collaborate with you!
Looking for collaborators for the event early on will increase the event’s visibility and increase its chances to go viral. Nonetheless, the more people work on the event, the less work each member has to do. - Split the collaborators on the event into task forces
Here’s how we did it: - Marketing — Graphic design, writing posts, aggregating social media accounts where we can post our materials, posting marketing materials, creating related events across social media platforms.
- Content — External relations, speakers, project mentors, judges
- Logistics — Platform for the event, signups, submissions, certificates, prizes
- Your marketing plan is the key
Begin marketing the event as soon as you can, push the event on social media at least two weeks in advance. - Spare some time for mentoring
From feedback we received, the mentorship part of the event gave valuable insights to the students. Groups without ideas were able to refine the problems they wished to solve. Groups who already thought about something had the chance to refine their timeline and software design document (SDD).
