Hackathon: A Starter Pack for Beginners
So recently I participated in A.I.ckathon, a Southeast Asia level hackathon hosted by the UM App Club and Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology (FCSIT) University of Malaya (UM), which was held at IskandarSpace, Johor. This was my first time joining a hackathon, which was a fruitful and unforgettable one.
What is a hackathon?
A hackathon is a 24–48 hours event where the participants have to create and produce a solution with functional prototype, and each group of participants have to pitch their ideas at the end of the event to the judges, where some of them are sponsors of the event. Hackathon is almost similar to marathon, where participants have to work on the idea continuously with the given hours.
Important: Participating in a hackathon doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to be someone who is good at programming. Try to figure your team as a startup, where the 3Hs, Hacker, Hustler, and Hipster should be exist within a team. Besides having someone who codes well, you need someone who is good in leading the group, and also who is good in pitching and presenting ideas to the judges and the sponsors so as to attract them and make them want to know more about your idea. The representative of our team performed his pitch smoothly and on point, thus we emerged as the top 10 finalist.
Before the hackathon
The thing that my teammates and I regretted the most was the fact that we did not prepare anything AT ALL before the hackathon started. We did not even come out with a focused, structured ideas based on the theme, and we came to the hackathon with empty hands and blank mind. Furthermore, among five of the teammates, none of us actually have the coding experience in producing html using javascript. Eventually, on the first day, our team spent a lot of time in identifying problems and brainstorming ideas, while other teams had already begun to code.
The 48-hours hacking
Whenever you encounter any problem in coding, please do not hesitate to approach for mentors, as they will provide mentors for a student-based hackathon. Dare to ask! Asking is the only way to learn. As I mentioned before, none of us in our team have experience in coding, so the first 24 hours, we spent a lot of time in installing software and watching video tutorials. However, this was the golden opportunity to actually get ourselves out of our comfort zone to approach to something we were totally unfamiliar. Our learning ability somehow skyrocketed and we learn numerous thing related to web development within the 24-hours.
“You will never know your limits until you push yourself to them.”
- Amy Rees Anderson
We approached one of the mentor the day before the pitching session, and we learned how to develop a webpage using javascript, and included the API provided by the sponsors in our code. It was too bad that I only realised that our mentor is actually one of the editor of UMHack as well, Desmond Yeoh(I never see him in person so yeah *facepalm).Fortunately, due to the mentoring session, we finally have idea on how to start with our functional prototype.
My teams and I started to rev up our engines only 14 hours before our pitching session start, where we stayed up throughout the night to get our presentation and prototype done.(Do this at your own risk.) I was grateful to be in a team where we were willing to sacrifice our sleeping time and bent over backwards to work on the idea.
Pitching day
It’s shame that my teams never expect to be in the finalist, thinking that we did not have appealing code to impress the judge, and hence we did not prepare anything for the final round of the pitching session. Nevertheless, our team representative did present well with structured idea within the 2 minutes. 2 minutes is actually a short one, thus you have to have a well-structured idea and present the point that fulfil the requirements of the judges and satisfy the need of the sponsors. Other than that, beautiful UI design and slides did help us to attract the judges. For instance, we added taglines, and created design for our logo. We created the design of the interface using Photoshop.
All of us were overwhelmed while our teams were selected as the top 10 finalist, as we were called by the emcees to validate our API to the judges. Three teams from UM proceeded to the finals, and surprisingly all of the chosen teams, including us were first year students. As we had only 30 minutes left to our second round of pitching session, we searched for facts that support our idea.
The second pitch was a 7-minute-pitch and 3 minutes of Q&A session. Unfortunately, we spent too much time in explaining the ideas which made us short of time in displaying our demo, besides the fact that our interface was a very simple one. There were teams presenting more complex prototype such as VR,AR, which I found really impressive since they can produce such prototype within 48 hours.
Other than hackathon
Hackathon is the best platform for us to meet new friends and networking with each others. Learning from the previous event, this time I was able to converse to people from other universities that shares the same interest and ideas that are worth to discuss.
Some Takeaways
- Do create a team that consists of people from different expertise, and build team spirit before the competition starts.
- Do prepare your idea before joining a hackathon. (But not coding in advance)
- Do ask for mentors’ assistance.
- Do communicate and expand your social circle with other contestants. Let the ideas spark!
- Do prioritize to learn something new rather than aiming for the first prize. Winning or losing does not matter. You will learn exponentially through a hackathon.
Last but not least, I would like to express my gratitude towards each committee of A.I.ckathon for giving me such a good experience for my very first hackathon, and also my WRECKmates for their hard work.
