Recap of TartanHacks 2022
Hi y’all! My name is Anushka, and I am the Director of ScottyLabs, aka the organization that holds TartanHacks. I’m here to recap our flagship hackathon and talk about the highs, the lows, and the bagels.
Building a Team
Our organizing team consists of Carnegie Mellon undergraduates who are ~passionate~ about hackathon culture. We had six main committees: tech, design, logistics, hacker experience, finance, and sponsorship. Each committee was led by leaders in ScottyLabs and had about 6–8 people per committee. To learn more about the people behind ScottyLabs, you should check out our website!
Redefining the Event
A New Hybrid Experience
Learning Curve
The last time we held an in-person hackathon was February 2020, about a month before the world shut down. The people who attended that event were long gone, and it was up to our team to rebuild the event from the ground-up again. Even though we had a lot of resources thanks to our predecessors documenting things, a lot has changed. Learning how to get permission for logos, handle our finances, and advertise the event was part of this new learning experience, but we now know how to streamline these processes next year.
National Outreach
A lot of things in the pandemic were bad, but we were excited to embark on our second attempt of becoming a national hackathon. We admitted around 450 students from across the country, and 20% of our active participants were from outside of CMU. We aim to push these numbers in the years to come, but for now, we’re happy that we are etching towards our pre-pandemic numbers!
Mixed Realities
Of course, everyone’s favorite platform these days is Zoom. Although we had opportunities for CMU students to participate in-person, many of our participants joined our sessions remotely. Participants earned points for attending sessions that would count towards their final Every year, we’ve become more adept in our streaming capabilities, and we’re hoping to continue this hybrid delivery in the years to come.
Revamping the Infrastructure
Speaking of platforms, our amazing tech team built new tools and revised old ones to deliver a more integrated experience. You can read more details about the tech behind TartanHacks soon, but below is a general overview of what we did. Overall, we received positive and constructive feedback for all parts of the system that we plan to push forth next year.
Registration System and Dashboard
Interested hackers would first access our registration system and subsequently access the dashboard with the same credentials. This was the one stop shop for the entire event. Participants could access the schedules, join sessions remotely, and keep track of their points. By building a custom system instead of using already existing platforms, we had more control over the UI/UX and could add cool features such as the leaderboard.
Discord Bot
After participants logged onto the dashboard, they could join our Discord server and become verified participants. The bot would then add the participants to their respective teams’ private channels by pulling that information from the dashboard. This created a seamless experience for the hackers and could ensure that they would know where they could interact with the other participants vs where they needed to grind with their teams.
Gavel
Modeled after HackMIT’s judging system, Gavel utilizes pairwise comparisons to help judge projects. This is the second year we used this system for the first round of judging, and this is something we definitely anticipate using in the future again.
Collaborations with CMU Organizations
One of our goals this year was increasing our collaborations with the rest of the campus community. After reaching out to several organizations, we are thankful for the Data Science Club, Blockchain Club, Undergraduate Entrepreneurship Association, and Robotics Club for their help running workshops on the Saturday of the hackathon and taught very help skills in machine learning, NFTs, startups, and Arduinos to our hackers. We hope to increase our reach next year and create more involved opportunities that are specific to a club or skill to reach a larger audience.
Looking Forward
Ordering less food
About the bagels…
We can only pray that another snow storm doesn’t come our way and prevent our hackers from coming in-person >.< but if this doesn’t scream “largest hackathon in Pittsburgh,” idk what will!
Focus more on diversity and inclusion
This year was our best year in terms of DEI, but we recognize that we need to constantly push ourselves to improve. Over the next will focus on creating a more inclusive space for minority groups, new hackers, and hackers from non-traditional backgrounds so that we can empower more people and ideas from everywhere.
Building more infrastructure
On top of improving our current technologies, we have several ideas for new applications next year. Since ScottyLabs runs multiple events throughout the year, we want to create an app that will unify all of these experiences to encourage our members and our participants to keep track of their progress.
Becoming a ‘bigger thing’ in the CMU community
ScottyLabs has been around for over ten years. Despite its rocky start, it has taken hold of many students over the past few years, and we only expect it to grow bigger. We hope to gain more legitimacy through our student organization committee, which would only help us increase our reach and spread our mission of creating a community of leaders in technology and design. If you’re reading this, we hope you feel the same, and we look forward to seeing you next year at TartanHacks 2023!
