A Virtual hackathon — Make-a-Ton’20
Make-a-Ton, conducted by the Centre for Innovation, Technology Transfer and Industrial Collaboration (CITTIC), returned this year with a 48-hour online hackathon. Since its inception in January 2019, we had been patiently awaiting our turn to conduct this reputed hackathon. When it was finally our turn, Covid-19 had other plans. There was no way we would drop plans to hold Make-a-Ton this year because this could well be the last event that we get to organize in the university. So this year we decided to conduct Make-a-Ton online. All meetings before the event were conducted in Google Meet and we had some people to do the unavoidable on ground works at Kochi.
The event was held from 31st October to 2nd November 2020. It was the first time that Make-a-Ton was happening online, considering the global pandemic. But now that it was a virtual event, we were able to host a much wider palette of audience with participants coming from all parts of the country. It was an open hackathon allowing teams to work on projects which they were passionate about. Additionally, there were two extra tracks namely social innovation for projects which have a social impact and Hack 4 CUSAT, a track exclusively for CUSAT students for solving problems related to the university.
The official event website went live on September 29th. The registrations were closed within the first week after receiving 130 registrations. The event received participation from students from different universities across the country. Until the registrations were closed, participants were given constant updates through the website, email correspondence, and social media. The event was fast approaching and we understood that it’ll be difficult to run an online event of such big scale with the organizers also sitting at home. We decided that some of the organizers would come to CUSAT to ensure that everything ran well. We reached the campus the day before the event and CITTIC provided us with all the necessary facilities.
Once the registrations closed, the stage was set for all the participants and organizers. Discord was used as the platform for hosting the two-day event. A well-structured discord server was created specifically for the event. It consisted of separate text and voice channels catering to the different needs of every participant. Separate channels were created for announcements and general chat. Each team was given a private channel to hold their discussions. There were also channels for games, music, and off-topic discussions. A resources channel was also set up to encourage shared learning. All the participants were invited to the server after registration.
On October 29th, the organizers streamed an orientation session explaining the ins and outs of the event. It was an interactive session with the organizers answering doubts from the participants. After the orientation, the participants had a team formation phase where the individually registered students formed teams of 3–5 members within themselves. This also meant that all the participants got a chance to meet and greet each other, which online events lack these days. A total of 27 teams were formed after the orientation which competed in the hackathon.
The orientation, inauguration, interactive sessions, and the valedictory function were streamed live on YouTube. These were not restricted to the participants alone and were open to all.
The event was inaugurated on 31st October 2020 by the Honourable Vice-Chancellor of Cochin University of Science and Technology, Prof. K. N. Madhosoodhanan. The hackathon also included interactive sessions by experts from the industry. Mr. Suman Debnath, AWS Developer Advocate gave a session titled ‘Art of the possible’ on Artificial Intelligence. Mr. Hari Shanker, WordPress Community Manager at Automattic shared his views on taking your office online and Mr. Amrit Sanjeev, Staff Developer Advocate at Google gave valuable insights to participants on ‘Building better products — from Hackathon to production’.
Entrepreneurs from various startups provided continuous mentoring for the participants. The mentoring took place in three stages. The first milestone check was to guide the teams in the right direction with their products. The second milestone check focused on business development and the polishing of the solution. The third and final milestone check was a pitch workshop to teach the participants the art of pitching.
Students were actively involved throughout the 48 hours to develop their solutions. They were discussing their solutions with the mentors, positively taking feedback, and interacting and networking with their fellow participants. There were no dull moments and the atmosphere was lively always.
The judges appreciated the participants for their innovative solutions. The first prize winner of Make-a-Ton was team CrackHack. The team consisted of 3 members, Anito Anto, Abhishek and Abhijith P. Realizing how important it is for students to understand what they are taught and to make online learning much more fun and interactive, their idea was to create an interactive web platform in which teachers can interact with their students through video, and also with a real-time 3D model of the portion they are taking. They broke all bounds when they added a voice-based interface for students and teachers to interact with the 3D model.
Team Genic won the runners up prize. The team (Joel Sunny Varghese, Roshni Rajan, and Akhil Biju from Sree Buddha College of Engineering, Pattoor), created an E-Health platform. A special prize for the most socially impactful project was given to Team Schrodinger, who developed an online teaching solution that can be used even with very low internet connectivity. Rizwan Asif, Adarsh, and Abhiram (Dept. of Photonics, CUSAT), created a solution for making online class/education accessible to all by drastically reducing the bandwidth required by students, replacing streaming slides with static images and instantly sync the view of teacher and student.
Team BroCode was awarded the ‘Hack 4 CUSAT’ prize for developing digital solutions catering to problems faced by students in the university. The team of 5 students from CUCEK built a platform that consisted of an array of features to solve campus-specific problems integrated with a voice interface.
Every year Make-a-Ton makes it a point that the participants take something of value with them after the event. Make-a-Ton received a massive positive response from all its participants as it provided a platform for students to start their journey in innovation. Make-a-Ton once again, made its mark, with a greatly successful virtual event!
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(Article written in collaboration with Martin George and Jyothis P)
