When I graduated nearly two decades ago, we haven’t heard the term called Hackathon. Nowadays, you hear it everywhere – in colleges, in offices and in conferences. This weekend it was the turn of my Alma mater SVCE‘s Alumni Association’s turn to organise a programming hackathon along with the college’s ACM Chapter. It was held at Ascendas, Taramani, Chennai. When I was invited to be a mentor, I presumed it will attract a small number of participants. As I went in yesterday morning, I was surprised to find over 75 budding engineers who were neatly divided into 27 teams, all armed with their laptops in their hands and brilliant ideas in their heads. The organisers told me they got over 150 registrations and they had to reject half of them due to wanting of space.

I got a chance to spend some time individually with about 10 teams, and, I was blown away by the imagination of these ‘young’ minds. Almost all of them have identified a problem space that was real – it was their approach and solutions that needed guidance from the mentors. Some of the ideas I saw were:

  • An Agro-farmer database that’s easy to capture and administer – Social Network for farmers
  • Citizens grievances app – Civic Issues
  • Driver’s safety mobile app – Accident detection and alerting
  • VR Environment to learn to code
  • Malware Analysis
  • Making ATM transactions safer
  • Password manager with a difference
  • Making Classroom learning fun and more …

The student’s energy levels and enthusiasm were infectious! Great show by the organisers.

Yet Another Hackathon 2018 by Sri Venkateswara College of Engineering, Pennalur, Chennai

75 young engineers at work from various colleges near Chennai

The students were to develop a PoC in 24 hours

The students were to develop a PoC in 24 hours

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