Advice from a First Place Hackathon Team: Study Buddy, 1st place winner of nwHacks 2021
Wondering how to get to first place with your hackathon project? Well in you’re luck, because we will be learning more about the team and process behind Study Buddy, which won first place at nwHacks 2021!
Study Buddy is an online collaborative platform that connects students together (like in a global pandemic). The platform allows students to collaborate in real time using a web browser where they can chat together, draw together and take notes together!
Keep reading to learn more about how this team planned and built Study Buddy!
Q: Your project had a lot of moving parts! What were some tools or platforms that you think are super important or that’s really allowed all of you to be able to communicate with each other and put the final product together?
A: The tools we used were actually the building blocks of Study Buddy. Just to name a few, we used Figma, Discord and GitHub. When doing a group project, the most important thing is to have a platform where we can share ideas, so we thought Discord would be a great platform to communicate verbally but also through text messages. For sharing code, we used GitHub because it is the go-to platform. Then we realized that we needed to design the UI. We turned to Figma and it was a great tool for us to just put our ideas together and pick & choose which one we liked best. Figma really helped us fast-track our process in terms of creating the product.
Q: My next question is, how did you make sure to incorporate everyone into the project at every phase?
A: I think that everyone was initially part of the idea. We all had to brainstorm and make sure we were on the same page with the design, so I think that really helped us in communicating what we’re making. It comes to actually bring everybody in, so this is how we started. We all have an idea of the product, brainstorming it and bringing it to life on a Figma. Again, bringing everybody’s idea just like collaborating, and then everybody was like, “Oh yeah, this feature. I can do that feature. I can do that.”.
For example, the way we did it was to have 4 features for our app; a video feature and a chat, and a drawing board and decoding board caught our coding editor. It was just very modular; I was working on the video feature, James was working on the drawing and Leo was working on the chat feature, and at the end, we all pulled together for the coding feature. Whoever finishes first could take on that and at the same time, that’s just the coding part of things, right?
There’s more than just coding in the morning and at night; we’re taking turns and sleeping. One person would work and the other would sleep for a bit and wake up. But in the morning when it was really crunch time, what we did was me and Leo were deploying the product and James and Eric was the one who made the presentation and we all finished in sync.
Q: When you planned your idea for Study Buddy, did you have to cut out features? And if that was the scenario, how did you decide which features to keep? If not, how did you plan to ensure you could finish within the hackathon?
A: I wouldn’t say that the idea did take 30% of the time, but it does take a significant amount of time just to agree on the idea as a team. We whipped up a few iterations and were like “Should we do it like this?”. It was mostly pointing out what works and what didn’t work. It comes back to being feasible, and that happens during brainstorming. Like, “What are the features of collaboration we want to include in Study Buddy?” and “What are the core aspects?”. We also divided our features into important ones and okay ones. After dividing the features, we go “Okay, what is feasible?”. It’s a lot of planning and organizing to determine how much we can do within the allotted time. I feel like we did a lot of project management collectively and that was key in ensuring that we met our goals.
Q: For any project, you are building, there is the problem you’re trying to solve and then the tech stack you use. Which aspect do you think is more important?
A: The problem is, basically what you’re trying to build is more important. Our team was building our project with our skill sets; what we know. With a time crunch, it’s hard to learn a new skill and be really good at it. That’s what gave us the edge; using things we already knew. Since we know React, we aren’t going to waste time arguing to use Vanilla JavaScript or Vue. We would also help each other out with the skills that one was less familiar with. We were able to teach each other and leverage each other skills and I think that’s what helped us.
To answer your question again, the idea was surely far more important than the technology because you have to properly define your problem and find a suitable solution. When you pitch a problem to people, they could come up with 20 different approaches to solving it. So, a winning idea is a solution that is feasible and that plays to your strengths. That’s what we did: we used our skillset to create our own, unique solution.
Q: Were you surprised your team won?
A: We didn’t think that we were capable of winning. It was quite a surprise to me and I think to the rest of the team as well. We knew that we had a good idea but we were not expecting to be part of the top. We were like “Yeah, we lost guys. We didn’t get it…”. We didn’t want to get our hopes too high given that nwHacks is so stacked and full of amazing people. All we did was to come up with a product that we could be proud of. And yeah, it feels great!
Q: So now that you’ve won first place at a hackathon, what advice would you give to hackers who also want to have a prize-winning project?
A: I think the most important part is to have fun — that’s the main reason why we go to hackathons. We all built something that we really wanted to see and that we thought would be successful. Hopefully, education companies could see it and say to themselves: “Hey this is what we need for our students!”. We all had a lot of fun making it and learning from it and we wish the same to all future hackers. Go out there and meet people. It seems like a lot of participants are really ambitious and want to make the coolest things possible. It’s great to have such ambition but you also need to be realistic. Since there is a deadline you should ask yourself what is feasible within the given time frame. Find an idea that is simple yet great and that tackles a problem that people face day to day.
Check out their Devpost here: https://devpost.com/software/study-buddy-8ovbqf
