You win some, and you learn some.
It was a gloomy Friday night, when a friend and I decided to attend the welcoming night for OpenED Hacks Toronto. When we entered the BrainStation building, we were intimated. Neither of us had ever participated in a hackathon. As we met up with other members of our team, we began to notice something particularly interesting about the event. It had seemed we were the only high schoolers there, which turned out to be advantageous for us. It served as a great conversation starter, and allowed us to network with other participants, many of which were studying and working in fields we wished to enter in the near future. Even though the opportunity to network with such brilliant people was wonderful, the highlight of the night would be the keynote presented by our advisor Farwa on digital thinking. The keynote was well thought out, and gave everyone in the room an excellent opportunity to gain intense insight into the world of digital design.
On the day of the hackathon, each team at the event was given 9 hours to create a digital product centered around the field of education. All throughout the day, we had multiple meetings with industry professionals to gain feedback and advice on our product. Their advice proved to be very insightful, and allowed us to further improve our products design, and our business plan. However, the biggest factor that allowed us to power through the day, was the people and the atmosphere of the whole event. It was something about the intensity of the event that pushed every member of the team to their peak form.
The team was working extremely hard as we had a time crunch -we only had a few hours to make the changes to our MVP, develop our pitch deck, and also conduct research. The mentors at Protohack were amazing, and gave great feedback. We learned that product design is an iterative process -there is always something to improve, something to add on, and even something that we can go without for version one. We spent the hackathon collaborating, researching, receiving feedback, and mapping out our product flow.
As such, we were able to finalize our MVP, and create a strong pitch for the competition. Through all our hard work, we were ultimately able to present in front of hundreds of people, and place 3rd at the event. OpenED Hacks proved to be an excellent opportunity for myCryptoHippo to develop, as well as demonstrating how, you can win some, and you can learn some, but sometimes you get to do both.
Special thanks to our advisor Farwa Kazmi for an excellent keynote presentation, ProtoHack for organizing this event, BrainStation for hosting us, and finally Richard, Samantha, Mathurah, and Andy for attending this event with me.
