Local Hack Day: Share 2020 Recap
Yesterday, the Singapore STEM Club hosted South East Asia’s edition of Local Hack Day: Share 2020! We had demos, games, workshops and an overall great time! It was our first time ever organising a digital event as well.
Featured Projects
At the core of Local Hack Day: Share is the demo day. We were able to experience some amazing projects during our demo day. Here’s a sneak peek into a few of the projects we saw.
Personal Health Assistant by Owen Wei
Owen Wei showcased a Personal Health Assistant that integrates artificial intelligence, social software and external health devices. It helps us monitor our health and any viral outbreaks.
Owen won the Best Local Project for his efforts.
123 Maths! by Edwin Cheah & Aarush Bajaj
Edwin & Aarush built a support site for those who are learning basic maths. The site has videos, quizzes and written resources. A great resource for younger students learning from home.
Check out their draft site: http://123mathsupport.weebly.com
Project Hope by Rikhljot Sandhu, Jan Borowski & Gaman Byna
Rikhljot, Jan & Gaman built a robot using Lego Mindstorms that plants seeds and waters the ground in areas that are inaccessible to humans or too dangerous to be in.
WhatsTheStats by Sam Poder
I also shared something! WhatsTheStats is a WhatsApp Bot service to enable people who are less fortunate in developing countries to get access to key stats about the Coronavirus situation. You can message any country name to find out the latest stats for that country. Additionally, you can message the bot “World” to get the most recent worldwide stats. This method provides access to this data with little to no data usage as it is text only. Additionally, it provides access to the data for people in low data areas. An area we didn’t get around to was providing who to call if you think you have the virus.
Fun Activities
We also had loads of fun during Local Hack Day! We played Draw & Guess, Cool Maths Games & Kahoot. It was a blast (even us organisers made it through the stress and had fun).
But we can’t forget the Minecraft Events! We had build battles and a Redstone creation challenge. The Redstone challenge served as an introduction to circuits in a more familiar environment for the students. Neer’s winning Redstone submission can be viewed here.
Closing Thoughts
We learnt a lot from organising our first online events. There are some pros and cons for this approach and it’ll be interesting to see where online hackathons go after COVID-19.
A benefit to organising an online event is generally your event is more accessible as it removes the travel barrier. Additionally, the process of organising one is much simpler due to the hacker covering your venue and food. Hosting an online event also makes you think outside of the box which leads to exciting new ideas (we are certainly doing more Kahoots)!
With these benefits though come with some downsides, managing large groups of people on chat platforms can be a struggle. The chat can become flooded with advertisements and spam messages. You often miss messages due to this. Additionally, it is hard to keep a community-engaged you experience people dropping out throughout the day.
Once it is safe to meet again we look forward to hosting physical events but do recognise the importance of building an online community. For that reason, we’ve started a Discord server which you can join here.
Thanks for reading and I’ll now leave you with Niko from MLH interviewing me during the APAC closing ceremony. Enjoy!
