nwHacks 2019 Winning Projects

Taking a closer look into the 3 winning hacks of nwHacks 2019 ✨

Published in

nwPlus

4 min readJan 2, 2020

On January 26–27th, 2019, we welcomed over 700 hackers from around the world to build 132 projects together at nwHacks — Western Canada’s largest hackathon. Every year, nwHacks attracts the brightest minds from the Lower Mainland and beyond to make their ideas come to life.

In this article, we will take a closer look at the 3 overall winners’ projects and the issues that they solve.

3rd Place Winner: MusicHub

Team: Chauncey Liu, James Zhang, Benjamin Kwok, Samson Tsui
Check it out here.

The MusicHub team hard at work and at their demo!

The world is going paperless —and composers are starting to write their music digitally too. While document writing and software development have solutions for version control (ex. Google docs + Git) already, there is no such technology for music composers.

MusicHub allows you to track your music notation files so you can compare any past versions and instantly see what changes you made. This program supports MusicXML which is the open-source standard for music exchange (analogous to HTML and JSON) and is supported by all major music notation software, including Sibelius, Finale, and MuseScore. By allowing composers to more easily create their work, MusicHub hopes to bring more music into this world and help to bring people together through music.

2nd Place Winner: ASKEY

Team: Nicholas Wong, James Park, Valerian Ratu, Ali Arshad
Check it out here.

Breaking the locks that divide the world, one asKEY at a time.

Ever since the creation of online video sharing, high bandwidth usages have always been a major issue. Some areas in the world have limited bandwidth, making it difficult for some families to have a video call with loved ones overseas. Video adds a layer of depth that in unattainable by voice calling only.

ASKEY was developed to be a solution to all of these issues. By converting the video to an ASCII string before transmission and then displaying the video through ASCII, we end up sending a significantly smaller amount of data. It is a functional web application that allows you to chat and facetime people with audio at ultra-low bandwidth requirement. For a comparison, a 480p raw video would require a bandwidth of 11MB/s while ASKEY can produce the same video with 44 times less bandwidth at 250KB/s!

Not only did the ASKEY Team build a hackathon-winning project, one team member, Nicholas Wong, went on to join the software development team here at nwPlus.

nwHacks 2019 was truly a pleasure to participate in, it was really organized and that stood out to all of us who were hacking. I joined them later in the year and throughout the dozen of clubs I’ve been in, I’ve never seen a club with better dynamics. I’m genuinely excited to pay it forward this year! — Nicholas Wong, ASKEY Team member, Software Developer at nwPlus.

1st Place Winner: nekoTap

Team: John Lee, Sherry Yuan, Sophie Berger, Russell Blickhan, Charlotte Chen
Check it out here.

Reports estimate that half of patients with chronic illnesses like heart disease or asthma don’t take their medication, and that poor medication adherence could be costing the country $300 billion in increased medical costs. When the pharmacy hands over your medication, it usually comes with a stack of papers, stickers on the pill bottles, and verbal instructions by the pharmacist at the pharmacy counter. It is easy for patients to get confused and forget which medications to take.

NekoTap helps patients access important drug instructions quickly and when they need it. Pharmacists can relay the most important information to patients by uploading drug information, supplying audio recordings of the dosage instructions, and set up refill reminders. All patients need to do is go on the nekoTap app and follow the instructions laid out by the pharmacist!

Final Sentiments

Although we were only able to showcase the 3 winning projects in this article, we’d like to emphasize that all of the ideas born at nwHacks are an achievement worth celebrating. Check out all 132 of our project submissions on Devpost.

Aside from winning prizes, hackathons are a place for students to innovate ideas, learn new skills, connect with industry mentors, and build friendships. Whether you are a tech newbie or marching through your 4th nwHacks, we hope to see you at nwHacks 2020 this coming January 11–12th!

See you at nwHacks 2020!

Words by Anita Tse, Co-President of nwPlus 2019/2020